Jessica Traynor’s New Arcana explores grief, bad boyfriends and the power of female friendship through readings of the Tarot and Tim Burton movies. Moving from teenage friendship and destructive relationships towards a tangling with the realities of family life, domesticity, and desire, this highly inventive collection builds into a heartbroken letter to a dear friend (personified in the poems as ‘lydia deetz’) who died by suicide. Interwoven with numbered poems from a newly imagined Major Arcana, New Arcana celebrates both the holding on, and the letting go.
New Arcana is Jessica Traynor’s fourth collection, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Dedalus and Pit Lullabies (2022) from Bloodaxe.
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It is that strong sense of uncanniness throughout Jessica Traynor’s Pit Lullabies that marks it with distinction. The eponymous Pit Lullabies – there are 10 in total – form a wild, exhilarating backbone to this collection where bone is a key word. A book about motherhood and birth trauma… its roots are firmly entrenched in the natural world… Traynor’s poems, like those of Walter de la Mare, are most deadly when they are pared back, almost child-like.
" - The Irish Times
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Fierce and profound, Pit Lullabies is one of the vital books of the new Irish poetry.
" - New Hibernia Review
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Traynor's poems lurk in liminal spaces between light and dark, joy and fear, real and imagined, so that the world is unsettled and unsettling.
" - Poetry London
