Home Backlist Beauties Backlist Beauties—Accurate Measurements by Adam White

Backlist Beauties—Accurate Measurements by Adam White

Accurate Measurements|Adam White|Doire Press|ISBN: 9781907682223|€10


Backlist beauties—in brief

In this series publishers and booksellers talk about brilliant titles from their backlist.

Next up is Doire Press, who tell us about Accurate Measurements, by Adam White.


What we love about this book

This book exemplifies why we started the press. We first came across Adam White when he performed at North Beach Nights, the poetry slam that we ran for many years here in Galway.

His talent was clear from the moment he took the stage—raw and powerful in its simplicity and grace. He wasn’t exactly slam material but that didn’t matter. Over the next year we watched as his talent grew, and eventually approached him about a book. He had very little profile as a poet and we knew we’d sell very few copies but we truly believed he should be published and so when Accurate Measurements was the only Irish poetry book to be shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize that year, we felt like our beliefs in why we do this was celebrated. 

A little flavour of what’s inside

“This is a young poet who, over a scarily compressed time period, has taught himself to take accurate measurements, who has grasped the knack of weighing and balancing stanzas, who has come to intimately know the grain of his material, who has learned to fix line against line in torque and tension.

Indeed the book’s physicality is one of its greatest pleasures… This is a poet who, as he so memorably puts it, speaks ‘from the hands’. Yet this is also very much a poetry of intellect.” —Fellow Cork poet, Billy Ramsell.

A line that sings 

‘No one ever got the hanging of a door right

first time round. That’s what makes it beautiful

to go back to time and again.’

—First lines of Accurate Measurements.

Cover design: Lisa Frank

Cover image: Diarmuid Russell


Previously on Backlist Beauties:

Upperdown, by David Brennan (Epoque Press)

Hope against Hope, by Sheena Wilkinson (Little Island)

Between Dog and Wolf, by Elske Rahill (Lilliput Press)

If you are a publisher or bookseller and have a title you’d like considered for Backlist Beauties, please get in touch with ruth@wordwell.ie