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Brendan Cleary -
Stranger in the House.

Brendan Cleary's poems have never been for the squeamish or faint hearted. They smack of the streets around us. His often manic personas confront their demons, lay bare their hearts and reveal the anguish of their personal disorder in the city's terrain. "Stranger in the House" sees Cleary in the realm of the urban epiphany. Tragic, sad, but darkly comic, his poems speak for the dispossessed, the bedsit dwellers, the losers in love.

The dominant ideology is held up to question in these sketches of spoiled idealism revealing a very subtle artfulness. Uncompromising and honest, Cleary continues to strike at raw nerves and his work reminds us how poetry can be a vital and haunting force.

"It was ringing in my ears when I put down Sacrilege."
Justin Quinn, Irish Studies review

"Brendan Cleary is renowned for performances of his poetry, but he is not a performance poet he is a poet who is a good performer... he is as clear on the page as he is on the stage."
Milner Place

The Resident

There's a stranger in the house
& he's wearing my odd baggy sweater,
talking in a voice I think I know.

Maybe it was someone I brushed into
at the streetcorner buying Donuts
or at the tennis match in the bustle?

Wherever this stranger hails from
he's settled in, my Star Wars mug,
my copy of Nietzche calm in his hand.

& the bed's just not big enough too,
the way he picks at his fingers too,
I want to converse but he shuns me.

This stranger guy is confusing life,
somedays I hatch plans to change locks
then I relent, I'd probably miss him.

Brendan Cleary
Stranger in the House.
Wrecking Ball Press
ISBN 1-903110-06-8