A Playful and Witty Bilingual Feast Her translators echo the wit and playfulness of the Irish-language poet’s originals This book is a selection, with translations by many hands, from Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh’s previous two collections in Irish, Péacadh and Tost agus Allagar, both published by Coiscéim Press. It is a feast for the eye and the ear and a […]
Irish Times Best Books of 2016
Delighted to see a few mentions of Gallery authors in the Irish Times Best Books of 2016: Vona Groarke’s Four Sides Full . . . such an intriguing read. Part autobiography, part essay, it explores life and art in the way that only a poet can. — Olivia O’Leary The astonishing providence of […]
Books of 2015 – Irish Independent
In poetry I was moved by What Just Happened by Sara Berkeley Tolchin. She works as a hospice nurse in America and the everyday realities of death pervade poems that reflect on nursing and explore the relationships between mothers and daughters, written in the shadow of her mother’s final illness in Ireland. She refuses to seek comfort […]
Scapegoat Review – Poetry Magazine
Scapegoat Review – Poetry Magazine Gillis’s skillful modulation of tone and his aphoristic precision allow him to create moments that ring true to feeling and afterthought, articulating the complex emotional resonance of memory. The opening poem, ‘Zeitgeist’, a series of four sonnets, introduces the reader to Gillis’s particular music; phonetically rich and conversational, his […]
Bernard O’Donoghue reviews The Way In by John McAuliffe
Complexities of migration, relocation and the journey home Although John McAuliffe’s new book is founded in what the back cover describes as “the domestic spaces and routines” of a contemporary life, subjects of which he is such a master, its general drift is out from the domestic centre and back. . . . the later […]
Glowing Review of ‘The Way In’ in Southword
Subtlety is a word that defines the poetry of John McAuliffe, whose previous collection, Of All Places was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. The title of his fourth collection, The Way In, suggests that he is an intuitive poet, who waits until he finds the right size and shape of key for the lock, then turns . . . […]
From Elsewhere review — Asymptote Journal
Signes: A Review of Ciaran Carson’s ‘From Elswhere’ For a poet, there are easier things than translations. The translating poet inevitably has to face the gnawing burden of writing for two people. “It’s a desperate system of double-entry bookkeeping,” Howard Nemerov lamented. The spectral presence of the author is always hovering somewhere, ready to […]
The Boys of Bluehill review – The Guardian
The Boys of Bluehill by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin review — distinctive and rewarding A murmur of nuns, dens, ruins … Ireland’s secret histories and the pain of the past echo through this powerful collection The late Peter Porter had a peculiar blind spot where modern Irish poetry was concerned. Irish poets, he suggested in […]
Peter Sirr’s best book to date
The Rooms is Peter Sirr’s eighth collection. A beautifully orchestrated meditation upon the meaning of the word ‘home’, it weighs in at just over one hundred pages and is thus a substantial addition to his work. By profession, Sirr is a linguist, teacher and translator who, like Joyce, Mahon, Clifton, spent many years abroad. It is not […]
Review – The Outnumbered Poet
THE LISTENER The Outnumbered Poet: Critical and Autobiographical Essays, by Dennis O’Driscoll It must have been in the early 1980s that I first met Dennis O’Driscoll, possibly after he published his first poetry collection, Kist (1982), and before the follow-up collection, Hidden Extras (1987). Dennis contributed to a review I was editing in Galway called […]
