A State of Justice

by Tom Paulin

A State of Justice

Genres: Poetry

47 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 1977

About the author

Tom (Thomas Neilson) Paulin is a poet, critic and playwright. He was raised in Belfast in Northern Ireland where his father was the headmaster of a grammar school, and his mother was a doctor. He was educated at Hull University and Lincoln College, Oxford.

He lectured in English at the University of Nottingham from 1972 until 1989, and was Reader in Poetry from 1989 until 1994. He was a director of Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, Northern Ireland. He has also taught at the University of Virginia and was Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Reading. He is now G. M. Young Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. He is a well-known broadcaster and a regular member of the panel for the BBC Television arts programme 'Newsnight Review'.

Much of his early poetry reflects the political situation in Northern Ireland and the sectarian violence which has beset the province since the late 1960s. His collections include A State of Justice (1977), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The Strange Museum (1980), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Liberty Tree (1983) and the acclaimed Fivemiletown (1987), which explores Northern Irish Protestant culture and identities. Later collections include Walking a Line (1994) and The Wind Dog (1999), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Invasion Handbook (2002) is the first instalment of an epic poem about the Second World War. His latest collection is The Road to Inver: Translations, Versions and Imitations 1975-2003 (2004), which brings together work from four decades.

His non-fiction includes Ireland and the English Crisis (1984), Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (1992), The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (1998), a critical study of the nineteenth-century essayist and radical, and (with Amit Chaudhuri), D. H. Lawrence and "Difference": The Poetry of the Present (2003), a study exploring Lawrence's position as a 'foreigner' in the English canon.

Tom Paulin is editor of The Faber Book of Political Verse (1986) and The Faber Book of Vernacular Poetry (1990). His plays include The Riot Act: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone, which toured Ireland in 1984, and All the Way to the Empire Room which was broadcast by the BBC in 1994. His latest book is The Secret Life of Poems (2007).

Tom Paulin lives in Oxford with his wife and two sons.

Reviews

[Emily]

Five stars for "Ballywaire" alone, DAMN.

[Stephen]

I still don't fully get poetry. It's like lyrics without the music, and with Paulin's slim volume I am trying to tune-in, but despite concentrating about half the time I find myself glazing over. I enjoyed some straight away, while other tiny poems have not yet been cracked despite several readings. Like visual art, I probably have a fairly entry-level appreciation for evocatively descriptive landscape/object painting. The figurative and experimental still leaves me cold... but I will persevere.

Poems like 'Seaside House' and 'A Desert Development' resonate more after a few readings. There is a cinematic quality of harsh lighting to the latter, and the former conjures a fusty neglect. I think I may just need space and silence to fully connect, but the more descriptively moody poems.

I read 'A State of Justice' both as a Somerset Maugham Award winner (1977), and because poetry is something I would like to learn to share with my partner.

[Gareth Williams]

These poems from the 1970s exist against a backdrop of ‘the troubles’. They deal with love and death, hope and disappointment but even in the hopeful moments there is a melancholy. Not poems to read to cheer you up, or are they poems that reflect my feelings. Nevertheless, they entertain with dextrous language and challenge with views different from mine.

[Nandini Pradeep J]

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