Going Around with Bachelors by Agnes Walsh

Agnes Walsh’s first book, In the Old Country of My Heart, is one of the most read and best loved books of poetry to come out of Newfoundland. Going Around with Bachelors continues and extends Walsh’s distinctive subject matter: the past in the present, Ireland and Portugal in Newfoundland, weather internal and external, the Cape Shore. Here are poems of place and of people in place, of family both immediate and extended. They are also absolutely contemporary poems by a poet, gifted with a remarkably flexible and distinctive voice, who is planted, in her own words, “straight up and down into what’s new.” 

Praise for Going Around with Bachelors:

“…Walsh’s poetry is like nothing else you will read: ‘clean as a shriek,’ declarative, funny in all the unexpected places, full of unadorned wisdom and bone-naked sadness. There is no word for what you will find here – the closest we have is truth.” —  Lisa Moore

“In precise and beautiful language, Agnes Walsh gives us back a world that has become lost to us. Going Around with Bachelors is both a remarkable book of poetry and a remarkable historical record of a time gone just out of reach.” — Helen Humphreys