Twelve Poetry Books of Christmas

In Harmony (Unfinished) are poems about hesitating at the borderline of risk, and proceeding anyway. The book plays on, and off, its epigraph, ‘Why not the life?’, exploring the ways artists carve the groove of daily practice. Though these poems are rooted in an acute feeling of the passage of time they create space for exploring the worlds we make apart from the one we are presented with.

Woman of Winter – Vona Groarke with illustrations by Isabel Nolan.

Cargo – Polina Cosgrave
Polina Cosgrave’s second collection addresses her young daughter, weighs the world ahead of her and posits a better future. Evocations of the author’s native Russia and a country ‘where no one can sleep at night’ pave the way for the chilling documentary detail of the title poem and the desperation it fends off. But this wide- ranging book also embraces the erotic and the ecstatic as they meet the tenderness of poems such as ‘What Makes You Special’. With social consciousness, wit, elegance and a cavalier abandon, Cargo confirms the presence of a daring, vital new voice in Irish poetry.

Long Distance – John FitzGerald
Long Distance reveals the deepening impression of a poet who is both chronicler of all that fades and passes and observer of ‘our giant reapers’ that harvest wind for ‘our new elixir’. In forms that range from sequences of sonnets to haiku he acknowledges and brings to life vividly worlds familiar and strange. ‘I have work to do / to keep it all as it is,’ he writes in resonant and remarkable poems cognizant that ‘a long note / from an angel’s throat once sung / can never be silenced’.

The Blue Cocktail – Audrey Molloy
Shortlisted for the Irish Books Awards Poem of the Year 2023.
In cinematic clarity Audrey Molloy’s second collection probes ideas of home across her native Ireland and Australia where she now lives. The Blue Cocktail is strange, sexy and intoxicating.

What Remains the Same – Alvy Carragher
History hounds the writer’s heels and ancient hurts return as she searches for a voice and for forgiveness. In work that tells ‘the whole house deaf / to what it was that went on / in the rooms of its daughters’ What Remains the Same is a distressing book. But through the illumination of dark passages in her own and in our country’s woes Alvy Carragher, in poems touched by something like love, presents a tale of survival and a guiding light.

Then the Hare – Michelle O’Sullivan
Then the Hare displays further examples of Michelle O’Sullivan’s precision of detail and feeling, rendering them in her signature idiosyncrasy of syntax and word use.

Custom of the Coast – Paul Muldoon with illustrations by Martin Gale
In Paul Muldoon’s typically inventive drama for two voices one strand recounts the adventures of Anne Bonny, an eighteenth- century pirate from County Cork who roamed the Caribbean until, after being apprehended, her death sentence was commuted because she ‘pleaded the belly’. A parallel strand reports the shameful case in which the lost pregnancy of an Indian dentist in Galway, Savita Halappanavar, became her death sentence because the law in Catholic Ireland of that time forbade a termination to save the mother’s life.

National Theatre– John McAuliffe
The poems in National Theatre navigate present-day strains and pleasures even as events — driven by national politics and global weathers — alter and define their range. Other writers — Derek Mahon, Martin Amis — are subjects of notable elegies. ‘Domestic’ poems dramatize, with tact, joy and sadness, the evolving relations between child and parent. All through, art’s place in human days is valued as ‘life swims / into the fortress of a formal device’.

Old Friends– Aifric Mac Aodha / David Wheatley
Much of Aifric Mac Aodha’s new collection is made of longer poems or sequences whose individual parts possess the force of aphorisms. Drawing on old Irish sayings and idioms her often musical lines (‘Cuireann an chuimhne, cara an chumha . . . ’) are matched by David Wheatley’s fluent verses.

Of Shards and Tatters – Eamon Grennan
A central theme in this collection is memory and its fragility. As the author’s mind begins to lose its steadiness he retrieves moments of wonder from childhood and fixes them for us. His characteristic long, sinuous sentences, with words and sounds yoked together, build an elegy for Tim Robinson, reconstruct the discovery of his dead father and pour out anguished mourning for a belovèd brother while celebrating an anniversary with his partner and the ordinary joys of family life.

At the heart of Mícheál McCann’s eagerly awaited first collection is ‘Keen for A— ’, a re-imagining of Eileen O’Connell’s heartrending Lament for Art O’Leary. For all the solemnity of its subject matter love poems leaven its atmosphere as Mícheál McCann’s debut glows with the sense of someone who knows he has ‘discovered the name of his destination’.