Old Friends review in The Irish Times:
There’s a pleasingly spiky quality to the poems of Aifric Mac Aodha in Old Friends (Gallery, 64pp, €11.95/€18.50), as translated by David Wheatley; something to do with the veracity of the spoken, seen and subsequently dissected rubbing alongside a fresh, sardonic tone.
Mac Aodha’s delivery has a little in common with “the woman vet on the television/who puts her interviewer off his stride/with her dry, honest voice” in Young Man’s Choice; there’s a matter-of-factness that undercuts, or at least resists, easy poeticisms or any plangent straining towards epiphany. Among the many things that entice a reader is the sense of self-awareness, of the pleasure of encountering good, witty, undeceived company in Mac Aodha’s addresses, apparently offering “Full permission to the ‘good for you’ crowd” while mercifully withholding any sense her poems themselves might be misread as a balm.
One senses that this voice could comfortably make room for more or less anything; there’s a certain capaciousness with which her cool-headed, steadily observant work embraces the world as it is: “I’m fond of you all,/from the priest to my enemies’ list”, all the while playing it cool, or at least refusing any sort of lazy, bardic grandiosity: “Distrusting my own narrow knowledge base”.
Her subjects range from bloody killings to a common – or indeed putative – lizard, but what she’s most adept at is “Always the feel of a thing,/never the fact”. Her atmospheres are built through diction, the adroitly handled syntax and vernacular control with which Wheatley has rendered this work into an entirely contemporary, European, supple voice in English.
Untrustworthy, in a positive sense, Mac Aodha is at once “the/ good Irish colleen,/the class prefect” but entirely herself, too and all the better for it. This is a short book, but repays lengthy revisiting, and leaves its residue: “The splinters of an old door/you called my subjects”.
— Declan Ryan, The Irish Times
Read Athoscailt, a poem by Aifric Mac Aodha translated by David Wheatley.
