A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Following her 2013 debut This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine / Strong Award), Tara Bergin returns with her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx. The poems draw on folksong, fairytale and theatrical monologue as Bergin explores the alluring and sometimes tragic consequences of translation. When she committed suicide in 1898, Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx, pioneering sociologist, and translator of Flaubert's Madame Bovary) imitated Flaubert's heroine, Emma. Both women, in their own ways, died passionate deaths, and Bergin's poems are concerned with intense love, intense grief.

With a sing-song rhythm and dark humour, they play off the natural theatricality of great lovers, great writers and great readers who, like the fancy-dressed children in 'Mask', are both 'themselves and strangers'. 'That's all they wanted.'

About the Author

Tara bergin was born and grew up in Dublin. She moved to England in 2002 and currently lives in Yorkshire. In 2012 she completed her PhD research at Newcastle University on Ted Hughes's translations of Janos Pilinszky. She won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize 2014 for This Is Yarrow, published in 2013.