The Banality of Power

In The Banality of Power, James Byrne anatomises the everyday mechanics of harm, tracing how cruelty becomes procedure, how violence is normalised, and how authority hides in plain sight. These poems move from Eichmann's glass cage to boardrooms, tabloids, riots, outsourced pain and climate breakdown, always alert to the way institutions convert human lives into abstraction. Byrne braids political witness with history and myth, channeling England through its Boudiccan roots and Roman invasion, finding Shelley on the shores of Italy, standing up to how corporate banality blameshifts or sidesteps away from justice. Fierce, lucid and sometimes darkly funny, this collection insists on moral attention without offering false consolation, holding open a space where anger, grief and tenderness can sharpen into resistance.