Milk Snake is the debut pamphlet from Donegal poet Toby Buckley, who is based in Belfast. In Milk Snake, Buckley invites us to look at the world from a slightly different angle, where small things become unsettling if you look closely enough. The poet explores queerness, displacement and trauma through clear-voiced, deceptively gentle poems about fishermen, maggots and bees.
These lightly-done poems about wildlife and the sea, laced with an underlying sense of queasiness, herald a new Irish LGBTQIA+ voice, who will be of interest to readers who enjoyed Queering the Green (ed. Paul Maddern), published by The Lifeboat in 2021.
The Emma Press