Angela Patten on Anton Floyd’s Falling into Place

Profile Angela Patten LE P&W Mag August 2019

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“Falling into Place,” Anton Floyd’s new poetry collection from Revival Press, captures the essence of what it is to be alive at a particular time and place and the many events, both personal, spiritual and political, that have led up to it.

From personal narrative to elegy, and from free verse to formal sonnets, these poems combine the cadences of everyday speech with vivid imagery, figurative language and verbal song. Born in Egypt and having grown up in a multilingual world of Cyprus, Floyd deftly braids the sounds and flavors of these languages with his memories of things past—of a childhood imbued with the scent of “pomegranate trees” and “seasoned olives,” of kite-flying and bicycle-riding, abruptly disrupted by violence during the Cyprus War of Independence 1955 -1959, Turkish/Cypriot intercommunal conflict of 1963 and the Turkish Invasion in 1974.

In poem after poem, he celebrates his love for family and friends, his reverence for the natural world, especially in West Cork where he now lives and for art and aesthetics, his belief in brother-and-sisterhood in “a world without passports…,” and both his Irish and Middle Eastern sense of home.

Angela Patten’s recent books include: High Tea at a Low Table: Stories from an Irish Childhood and In Praise of Usefulness.

Falling into Place Anton Floyd

Falling into Place is published by Revival Press,
the poetry imprint of The Limerick Writers’ Centre
https://limerickwriterscentre.com/product/falling-into-place/


© Angela Patten