Blue Lamp Disco

“The poems in Blue Lamp Disco, Martin Mooney’s third collection, range widely in subject matter, from the kung fu movies and wasteground games of a 1970s Ulster childhood, to the skatepunks and pipe-bombers of the new, post-ceasefire society.

​

This is poetry that draws its energies from vernacular speech and popular culture, and responds to that culture with an unblinkered sympathy, bringing an intent poetic imagination to bear on the matter and the language of a common but all-too-rarely-explored life.

​

But Blue Lamp Disco, like Mooney s earlier collections, also inhabits other worlds, attending to Neanderthal funerals and Aztec carvings as well as country & western music and punishment beatings. The collection extends the investigation of its central themes - the body as fragile yet tenacious public presence, the poetic potential of the ordinary far beyond the contemporary Northern Irish predicament, which is nevertheless refracted in the ‘right here, right now’ of these new poems.”