Mark Roper was born in Derbyshire, England, in 1951 and has lived in Ireland since 1980.
His collections include The Hen Ark (1990), which won the 1992 Aldeburgh Prize for best first collection; The Home Fire (1998) and Whereabouts (2005). His collection A Gather of Shadow (2012) was joint winner of the Michael Hartnett Award in 2014, and was shortlisted, along with Bindweed (2018), for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Even So: New & Selected Poems, was published by Dedalus Press in 2008. He has collaborated on 3 books with the photographer Paddy Dwan, and wrote the librettos for 2 operas composed by the late Eric Sweeney.
A true hymn to heaven and earth, Mark Roper’s new collection Beyond Stillness is a moving, sensitive exploration of our relationship with the damaged natural world, seen up close and often in astonishing, affecting detail. Greatly admired for his distinctive, sensitive depictions of the natural world, Roper is no stranger to listening, and the silence that arrives at the end of many of these new poems is one that brims with meaning, and one which, with unerring judgement, he allows to ring.
