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Tara Bergin:  Savage Tales • D A Prince: The Bigger Picture  •  Jules Whiting: Folding Time • Maeve McKenna: A Dedication to Drowning • Michael Daniels:  Ravenser Odd • R.A. White: A Frame Less Perfect

*****

Tara Bergin’s Savage Tales reviewed by Pam Thompson

Savage Tales by Tara Bergin. £15.99. Carcanet. ISBN: 9781800172319

Tara Bergin was born and brought up in Dublin, near to where Samuel Beckett was brought up. She currently lives in Yorkshire, is an academic at Newcastle University. Her PhD research centred on Ted Hughes’s translations of Hungarian poet, János Pilinszky.

Beckettian dark humour and seeming absurdity colours earlier collections, This is Yarrow (2013) and The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (2017), and spill over into this Savage Tales. Bergin’s sources are eclectic and numerous, her first two collections containing extensive notes on the poems. There is a…