Books by Brendan Cleary

Brendan Cleary was born in Carrickfergus in 1958 and attended Carrickfergus Grammar School. In 1977 he left Northern Ireland for Middlesbrough to attend Teesside Polytechnic. He then settled in Newcastle, where he founded Echo Room Press, was a co-editor of Stand magazine, and earned an MA from Sunderland Polytechnic. He now lives in Brighton, East Sussex, working as a poetry teacher and as artistic director for the regional poetry organisation The South, as well as performing his poetry regularly on radio, at festivals and in schools. Always an activist for small press culture, before Cleary published his first full-length collection The Irish Card with Bloodaxe Books in 1993, many of his pamphlets appeared with such presses as Jackson's Arm Press, Smith/Doorstop and Wide Skirt. His second full-length collection Sacrilege, also with Bloodaxe, appeared in 1998, followed in 2001 by Stranger in the House (Wrecking Ball Press). Three further collections followed from tall-lighthouse before Face from Pighog in 2013.