dismantle is a moving excavation of what it means to be a woman in the world today. Peeling back layers of meaning with precision, Tannam brings us a wild underworld of lost children, mothers and crones, each imbued with a fierce agency often denied them in the old myths. Formally and linguistically virtuosic, dismantle is both an exquisite undoing, and a call to explore the wide world.
Jessica Traynor
Author of Pit Lullabies
Anne Tannam’s newest collection is imaginative, unpredictable and pulsating with emotional energy. Whether challenging ideas of femininity and masculinity, womanhood and motherhood, re-examining myth, or seeing eye-to-eye with an aching personal loss, Tannam’s language is keenly felt. This is a dismantling in the truest sense – of time and memory, of the ideas we inherit, of the self. Tannam’s collection will shatter and re-arrange you, piece by sparkling piece.
Luke Morgan
Author of Beast
Anne Tannam’s dismantle is a collection that requires attention, and it is all the more powerful for that. Here is the arc of a life, from first cell to last breath and beyond. These are poems that ask difficult questions with uncertain answers: what is it to be a child, a daughter, a woman, a man? And what’s more, what is it to be? Formally daring, emotionally charged, and endlessly inquiring, it blew me away with its intensity. Here is a poet at the height of her power.
Alice Kinsella
Author of Milk: On Motherhood and Madness
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By ruminating on the crone, the other, the unfamiliar, dismantle imparts power to those silenced by patriarchy. With remarkable investment in the meaning and etymology of words, it explores language's ability to both oppress and liberate. The exceptional craftsmanship disrupts how one conventionally defines the world, forcing the reader to comprehend the unfathomable. Astonishing, witty, sensational and, above all, it provides the much needed journey out of reticence.
Dr Tapasya Narang
Postdoctoral Researcher
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....In the collection, she takes the figure of the mother back to its archetype - using myth, Biblical story and fairytale - to dismantle our ideas of womanhood and, at the same time, mime personal family stories. The book's stunning cover by artist Darragh Murphy is used in colour reproductions throughout, where the inventiveness of typography is intimately linked to meaning......an impressive range of reference and imagery ......balancing somehow, in a manoeuvre, typical of the book's connectedness, visceral bodily experiences with a kind of metaphysical sense of time and ageing...
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Maureen Boyle
Poetry Ireland Review Issue 144​​​​
These compelling, beautiful poems reveal a poet who has long found an original footing in the society in which she lives, finding in it a source of inspiration. Anne Tannam is energetically aware of the global sphere of injustice and beauty, of unfair destinies and healing gestures...
...The redressing voice of inner charity at work in her lines raises hurt and loss from the silt of memory and creates something serene with it. Dublin viewed as a local space is suggestively evoked in images and visions of people she has loved. And it is this tender voice that conspires with other, socially-engaged poems, creating an authentic collection that will speak to readers everywhere.
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Mary O'Donnell
Poet & Author
Anne Tannam's beautiful collection, Twenty-six Letters of a New Alphabet, invites the reader to reflect on the quiet joys of daily living - swans on the canal, the comfort of home - but does not shy away from the challenges that make up the fabric of a life...
..This collection offers a collage of experience, where conversations with the dead, memories and meditations on the present are woven together in a kind of stock-taking, looking back over the rites of passage on the journey, and those yet to come. A heart-warming collection, full of wit and wisdom.
Liz McSkeane
Author & Owner of Turas Press
Anne Tannam is a poet of honesty and intimacy; the poems in this new collection, written with a distinctive diamond clarity and seamlessly linked, create the feeling of a lifelong conversation with a trusted friend; the concatenation of love, loss and essential silence.
Maurice Devitt
Author of Growing Up in Colour
The poet rejects the standard literary mythos that would have us choose, in the poems we read and write, between inward revelation and inspired anger, say, or exploration of self and denunciation of society. Tannam has made the far more valuable discovery that the individuality of the poem (and of the poet) grows fuller and deeper through its attachment to the world….
...Twenty-six Letters of a New Alphabet is alert to the tolls exacted by time’s passage, even as it reflects, in its own progression, the richness of memory, carried through loss. For this delicate balancing-act alone, Tannam’s book may be regarded as a quiet triumph.
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Ciaran O'Rourke
Skylight 47 Issue 15
... The poet plays a minuet with the delicacy and skill that form demands.
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....This is a recurring trope, the limits of language. However, there is ample evidence in this often very lovely book, of the poet finding just the right gentle melody to capture the world perfectly. A fine achievement.
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Richard Hayes
Poetry Ireland Review Issue 136
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... well organised .. structurally coherent ... easy-to-read collection that will appeal to those who enjoy accessible poetry....
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...poems suffused with Tannam's strongly individual perspective..
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...there is sincerity, sensitivity and empathy in abundance..
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Tim Murphy
Dublin Book Review
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Tides Shifting Across My Sitting Room Floor
A profound and tender read that requires cups of tea, a sense of humour and a packet of tissues. At turns comforting and heart-breaking, the poems address life and death without sentimentality as the poet skillfully navigates relationships with loved ones, herself and the world around her with a conversational ease that left me stumped. There are few collections of poetry that have touched me so deeply.
Alvy Carragher
Author of Falling in Love with Broken Things and The Cantankerous Molly Darling
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The ineffable tenderness with which Anne Tannam’s poetry chronicles love and loss, and our daily struggles with both, may catch you off guard and leave a sob of recognition in your throat. Anne’s poems render truth with such exquisite clarity, and integrity, that we willingly place our trust in them – certain they are strong enough to carry us too.
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Eleanor Hooker
Author of The Shadow Companion & A Tug of Blue
Anne Tannam's 'Tides Shifting Across My Sitting Room Floor' maps loss and grieving, navigating through their disorientating effects, charting them with the eye of a careful documentarian. There is something universal captured in the specific and the deeply personal. The reader comes away feeling that the poet is working hard to sift lessons from all this loss so that she can share them with us, a worthwhile and generous lesson.
Grace Wilentz
Poetry Ireland Review Issue 128
Take This Life
The poems do indeed reflect her life and she takes her inspiration wherever she can find it. This may be the stray lyric of a song, an overheard conversation or a piece of writing. The poems reflect Tannam as a child, a mother, a friend, and simply as a human being. ….. she assembles an array of varied, often provoking images in her poems. BOOKS IRELAND
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