Mícheál McCann
Fiona Benson’s Midden Witch is a ferocious and frightening book that illuminates those women – often healers, artists – termed ‘witch’. In Benson’s poems a gentle spirit somehow coexists with an enormous rage. The book skilfully swerves from witch hunts and taxonomy to remedies for our worldly anxiety: “didn’t we get what we wanted – to be loved?”
Vona Groarke’s glittering ninth collection, Infinity Pool, is a luminous, stately book. Groarke’s poems have a plain-spoken appeal, but their depths are deceptive and seem to go on forever. “Here I am open, riddled with light.” Note perfect.
After Party by Dean Browne doesn’t feel like a debut collection, so measured and accomplished is the voice that constitutes it. Delightfully absurd, serious about the jokes it makes, and with enormous heart.
Declan Ryan
It was a great joy to see Tom Paulin back with Namanlagh, and to find the charged, vernacular energy and concrete descriptions he’s always excelled at transplanted into a new, at times more pared-down, diction, as well as a newfound sense of vulnerability adding additional charge to his voice.
[ Tom Paulin wins PEN Heaney Prize for NamanlaghOpens in new window ]
Rebecca Watts’s The Face in the Well had an assurance and clarity that I returned to often, whether battling on behalf of innocence or revisiting familiar scenes, and landscapes, Watts is a sharp and often surprising guide through “Uncountable/sweetnesses, tragedies”.
Ange Mlinko’s Foxglovewise is dazzling; richly musical, assuredly well-built poems full of a sure-footed combination of feeling and intellect – colourful, learned but always humane, she veers around in harmonic, allusive and elegant style. Somehow managing to balance the rococo with the austere, this is her best book yet.
Martina Evans
In Hymn to All the Restless Girls, Annemarie Ni Churreáin’s passionate folklore-lit voice is grounded and strengthened in its encounter with the cold, dry records of the Donegal County Archives. These poems burn exhilarating life into a terrible history.
Bernard O’Donoghue’s The Anchorage returns to his 1950s north Cork childhood for these powerful pared-back poems, so easy to enter so hard to forget. O’Donoghue takes memory to its darkest edges in this, his quietest and finest collection.
Karin Solie’s Wellwater stands out like the strong Cottonwood trees featured unforgettably in these pages. Dark shimmering poems link our environmental and economic crises alongside childhood memories of rural Canada. These outstanding elegies are so well made, they manage to console us as they chart our earth’s terrible loss.
