The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx

By Tara Bergin

Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize.
A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017.
Shortlisted for the 2018 Irish Times Poetry Now Award.
Features the poem 'Bride and Moth', shortlisted for the 2017 Listowel Writers' Week Irish Poem of the Year Award
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.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Release date: Aug 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781784103811

Tara Bergin

Tara Bergin is an Irish poet. Her first collection, This is Yarrow (2013), won the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry, and the Shine/Strong Award for best first collection by an Irish author. She received an Arts Council Ireland Literature Bursary to write her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (2017), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and chosen as Best Poetry Book of the year by The Times and The Irish Times. She now lives in the North of England.