Shortlisted for the dlr Strong Award at Poetry Now/Mountains to Sea
Ailbhe Darcy’s debut collection is a set of urgent dispatches from her point of origin, Dublin, and from her skirmishes further afield: London, Paris, Africa, Eastern Europe or the States. Driven less by metaphor than by wild conceits, semantic leaps, and startling juxtapositions, these are poems that itch and pluck at the pelt of what we think we know. Darcy is an exuberant and inventive new presence in the poetry world.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Ailbhe Darcy’s work has a precision and purpose rare in one so young. Her poems turn up without a word out of place and are not content to just decorate the page with metaphors, but determined to communicate to the reader Darcy’s vision of things as they are. Her words are sometimes soothing, sometimes brutal with her truths as she sees them. Never self-absorbed, she is a poet consumed by what the world around her is doing; it is this quality above all others which numbers her among the most promising new Irish poets. –Kevin Higgins
Approaching the world as they do with open hands, it is the good fortune of Darcy’s poems to find the globe dropping unbidden into their palms. This is intelligent, eloquent and durable work, offering portents of many rewarding instalments to come. –David Wheatley,
The Wake Forest Introduction to Irish Poetry Vol IV
… a beguiling, sometimes baffling, yet unique slant on the world… Read the darkly beautiful and restrained sequence ‘Unheimlich’, which views familial trauma through a storytelling lens, and you get an idea as to what this writer can do. –Ben Wilkinson,
Stride [on Imaginary Menagerie]
About the Author
Ailbhe Darcy was born in Dublin in 1981 and brought up there. She studied for her PhD and MFA at the University of Notre Dame in the US, and taught there and at Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster in Germany. She is now a lecturer in creative writing at Cardiff University. She has published her poetry in Ireland, Britain and the US, and co-edits Moloch, an online magazine of new art and writing. Selections of her work are included in the Bloodaxe anthologies Identity Parade and Voice Recognition, and in her pamphlet A Fictional Dress (tall-lighthouse, 2009). Imaginary Menagerie (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), her first book-length collection, was shortlisted for Ireland’s dlr Strong Award at Poetry Now / Mountains to Sea. A collaboration with S.J. Fowler, Subcritical Texts, was published by Gorse in 2017. Her second collection, Insistence,published by Bloodaxe in 2018, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2018 and the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2019. It won the Pigott Poetry Prize 2019 in association with Listowel Writers’ Week, Ireland’s largest poetry prize. It also won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (the English language poetry category of the Wales Book of the Year Awards), and went on to win the overall Wales Book of the Year Award 2019.
Wow! eBook
