Aidan Dun

McCool is a love story, a war story, set in the near future, told as a verse novel.  In the spring of 2011, after a western coalition invasion of Lebanon, Gala's husband, Colonel Parker James, is deployed to the frontline and remains in the Middle East through summer and autumn.

Anxious, lonely - childless - Galatea impulsively moves to London to resume a career as an art journalist where her path crosses that of the war painter McCool.  As the narrative unfolds in sonnet form a soldier becomes a pacifist, a tortured visionary develops a passion for pure beauty, and tragically, ecstatically, a woman becomes a goddess...

Sustaining and relishing the sonnet form throughout and telling such a brutally real yet imagistically exquisite and mythical tale in such a fresh, witty and deliciously modern way confirming him as the bravest, most lucid and deepest lyrical voice writing today. Philip Wells.

Again, Dun has told an epic tale in verse that is more than verse. Fusing elements of Gilgamesh, the Fenian cycle and Eugene Onegin, McCool is strikingly modern. 21st century art, war and love are explored in a 'white goddess' poem with London and Heliopolis as mystic backdrops. This is Byronic cinema. Niall McDevitt.

McCool is a love story, a war story, set in the near future, told as a verse novel.  In the spring of 2011, after a western coalition invasion of Lebanon, Gala's husband, Colonel Parker James, is deployed to the frontline and remains in the Middle East through summer and autumn.

Anxious, lonely - childless - Galatea impulsively moves to London to resume a career as an art journalist where her path crosses that of the war painter McCool.  As the narrative unfolds in sonnet form a soldier becomes a pacifist, a tortured visionary develops a passion for pure beauty, and tragically, ecstatically, a woman becomes a goddess...

Sustaining and relishing the sonnet form throughout and telling such a brutally real yet imagistically exquisite and mythical tale in such a fresh, witty and deliciously modern way confirming him as the bravest, most lucid and deepest lyrical voice writing today. Philip Wells.

Again, Dun has told an epic tale in verse that is more than verse. Fusing elements of Gilgamesh, the Fenian cycle and Eugene Onegin, McCool is strikingly modern. 21st century art, war and love are explored in a 'white goddess' poem with London and Heliopolis as mystic backdrops. This is Byronic cinema. Niall McDevitt.

The epic poem Universal whirlwinds the reader through North Africa, the West Indies, India. A travelogue, it detours into biographies. We meet the dreadlocked Ombilas, man of knowledge. We cross the world and find a young Cuban goddess who dances herself to a mythological death. We descend into Morocco. We find ourselves in the rough street-life of London.