VIII Stepping Poems & other pieces brings together ten years of work from Irish poet, critic and art practitioner Fergal Gaynor. This is poetry in the modernist tradition, often in experimental forms. The Stepping Poems make apparent a surrounding silence or inarticulacy; the terse, gnomic triads of the Runes are based on Old Irish riddling forms. Through these forms recurring themes are refracted: location, especially Gaynors native Cork City and Munster region; the presence of history, often as fossilized remains, in XI Pieces for Austria-Hungary; and the contemporary, as something alien and urgent, the subject of science fiction. VIII Stepping Poems & other pieces is at once learned and passionate, impersonal and highly individual.