PUBLICATIONS
Sea and Stone: The County Waterford Coastline
Mark Roper, with photographer Paddy Dwan
Whimbrel Press, 2023
ISBN 978-1-913446475
“Photographer Paddy Dwan and writer Mark Roper have collaborated to celebrate the cliffs, caves, and wildlife of the Waterford coast and people living along it. Packed with insights and idiosyncrasies, their journey from Dunmore East to Ferrypoint embraces birds, flora, geology, industrial history and fishing. Personal stories, including one from Ardmore potter Mary Lincoln, are interspersed with accounts of shipwrecks and ghost ships.”
Paul Clements, The Irish Times
Beyond Stillness
Mark Roper
Dedalus Press, 2022
ISBN 1915629039
“Mark Roper’s trademark spare, spiritual response to the natural world is intensified in Beyond Stillness …. ‘Drive’ details a stunning redemption …. Roper has an unerring sense of the gulfs between the miracle and damnation, its beginning and its end.”
Martina Evans, The Irish Times
Bindweed
Mark Roper
Dedalus Press, 2017
ISBN 978-1910251249
Available from here“Nature sits easy in the poet's sphere of influence in Mark Roper's impressive new collection of poems, Bindweed, which is a profoundly humane and often moving work.”
Paddy Kehoe, RTE
A Gather of Shadow
Mark Roper
Dedalus Press, 2012
ISBN 978-190661459.
Available from here“Although A Gather of Shadow reflects tenderness and loss so powerfully it’s not a heavy read. This isn’t only because several of the poems have light moments. Throughout there is a sense of how much life’s small and large events matter. Mark Roper’s writing sends that shiver down my spine which is the sign of true poetry. His images have become part of my consciousness. What greater praise could I give to this book?”
Myra Schneider, Acumen
Even So: New & Selected Poems
Mark Roper
Introduction by Carol Rumens
Dedalus Press, 2008
ISBN 978-1-906614-01-0
Available from hereJohn Killick, The North
Whereabouts
Mark Roper
Peterloo/Abbey Press, 2005
ISBN 1-901617-24-6
“Mark Roper’s Whereabouts is like an accidentally discovered bird’s nest of eggs: warm, beautifully coloured, pulsing with life. He looks with extraordinary care at the natural world, its force, variety, proximity and difference … Such praise and such astonishment, such accommodation of darkness and light, make Whereabouts a place we should all inhabit for a little while.”
Eamon Grennan, The Irish Times
The Home Fire
Mark Roper
Abbey Press, 1998
ISBN 1-901617-05-X
Signed copies available via email: 2markroper@gmail.com
“The Home Fire is a model of lucidity. What distinguishes Roper is the unerring accuracy of his language. His speculations have a deliberate and uncoerced quality; he is more likely to be overwhelmed by his subjects, as in the marvellous short poem ‘Sleeping With The Kingfisher’, than to impose his ideas forcibly upon them.”
Caitriona O’Reilly, The Irish Times
Catching The Light
Mark Roper
Peterloo, 1997
ISBN 1-871471-65-6
Signed copies available via email: 2markroper@gmail.com
“Mark Roper has emerged as one of the most accomplished and engaging poets writing in Ireland at the present. His work is characterised by a formal suppleness and a leanness of expression that facilitates a striking ability to see and move beyond the surfaces of daily life and landscape. If his poems primarily take their impetus from the natural world, Roper’s engagement with that world has a discernibly spiritual purpose to it. The best of his work makes the world new.”
Bill Tinley, Irish Literary Supplement
The Hen Ark
Mark Roper
Peterloo/Salmon, 1990
ISBN 1 871471 168
Signed copies available via email: 2markroper@gmail.com
This collection won the 1992 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Award for Best First Collection.“His work combines clarity and lyricism in such a way as to become the embodiment of the word Fresh”.
Ian McMillan, Poetry Review
Comeragh: Mountain, Coum, River, Rumour
Mark Roper, with photographer Paddy Dwan
Whimbrel Press, 2018
ISBN 978-1-909751-93-4
whimbrelpress@gmail.com‘They later share their findings via Dwan’s luminous photography, where closely observed nature studies shade into art, and Roper’s short, evocative prose passages, which shift seamlessly from hard facts to lyricism, and his spare, singing poetry.’
Paddy Woodworth, The Irish Times
The Backstrand: Tramore's Open Secret
Mark Roper, with photographer Paddy Dwan
Whimbrel Press, 2013
ISBN 978-1-909751-06-4
whimbrelpress@gmail.comSylvia Thompson, The Irish Times
The River Book: A Celebration of the Suir
Mark Roper, with photographer Paddy Dwan
Whimbrel Press, 2010
ISBN 978-1-905989-20-1
“Paddy Dwan, a press photographer in Waterford, is also passionate about wildlife and the river that runs by. Mark Roper is a well-honoured poet living farther up the Suir in Co. Kilkenny. Together, in The River Book, they celebrate this slow southern waterway with its mud and misty willows and the rich affinity of life along its banks. Dwan’s photographs are often memorably tranquil, but he is constantly alert to the moment: the little egret rising, trailing diamonds; the kestrel hovering in the dusk. Roper weaves his own evocative poems with voices from present and past, telling of cot, prong and scallop in crafted lifestyles all the Suir’s own.”
Michael Viney, Books of the Year 2010, The Irish Times
