Aodán McCardle - LllOovVee - Forbid me my love

'Aodán McCardle is a performance poet, artist, & tattooist. In this book he combines all three artistic expressions into a performance. These poems are audacious. A poetic trajectory worthy of reading aloud.'

- From the introduction by UllI Freer

'It is right and necessary to be speaking with strangers. There are islands, backroads and cliffs of wet inked worded sea ridgelines where aodán McCardle’s work emerges concrete and lyric as a chant of delicately provoking permutations. forbid me my love, the first part of this beautiful book, is poetry as poiesis or making. By means of a series of concrete meditations, McCardle takes us where he, or perhaps the words themselves, unknit, erase, appear and disappear. Wor(l)ds of the size of terrorist and bomb are subject to a system of alterations that end up shooting lovebombs from the page as if love could become an error in the system. The second part of the book, LllOovVee, starts closer to verse. Reading it, one can almost hear aodán’s delicate Irish voice, but any easy reading gets explosively interrupted by the scanned handwritten, scribbled and scratched lines that open another set of permutations, one about what is behind us, how to be there here and what is it to be there then now, in the making, in the ear and in the eye with this revealing poetry.'

- Martín Gubbins

This is part of a new series of Veer Books to be produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.