What happens when memory refuses to behave like memory?

This Is What I Remember brings together 21 Irish poems from the Sonic Poetry volumes by Alistair Sherwood ? poems in which childhood, landscape, family, animals, schoolrooms, Dublin streets and the peculiar logic of everyday life are allowed to become strange again.

Emerging from the Irish storytelling tradition and a life that begins around Clara Bog in County Offaly, these poems move between humour and tenderness, observation and psychological surrealism. A near-drowning becomes a conversation with faith. A teacher discovers an unexpected form of defiance. An orangutan returns a tissue at Dublin Zoo. A black cat becomes the centre of a neighbourhood dispute.

At the heart of the collection is Sonic Poetry, Alistair Sherwood's approach to poetry in which the written poem can also inhabit voice, melody and atmospheric sound. On the page, however, the poems stand independently: contemporary Irish poetry shaped by the rhythms of speech, folk tradition, storytelling and performance.

Funny, unsettling, nostalgic and occasionally absurd, This Is What I Remember is less interested in explaining the past than in discovering what the past has been quietly doing while nobody was looking.

For readers drawn to Irish poetry, narrative poetry, spoken word and performance poetry, contemporary folk storytelling, humour, memory and the strange poetry of ordinary life.