We are looking forward to the publication of three new poetry collections on 17 July 2025. The Convent of Mercy by Tom French, Over Here by Alan Gillis and Chic To Be Sad by Molly Twomey.
The Convent of Mercy is Tom French’s eighth poetry collection. He has steadily built a distinct, consistent and coherent body of work. His clear lyrics and narrative poems display a virtuosity of sentence and stanza. Poems embrace domestic and historic subject matter and touch on contemporary global unrest. From field notes at the back of his house to his daughter’s school tour, from a poem centred on an image of joy in the immediate aftermath of a school’s rugby final to a Tipperary epithalamion, Tom French reaches far. But ‘The Road from Schiphol’, a harrowing account of a pilgrimage to the site of a family tragedy, is a new kind of achievement. The Convent of Mercy, blending wry humour and deep empathy, is the work of a poet ‘in complete command of his materials’ (Thomas McCarthy, Dublin Review of Books).
Over Here plunges us into the middle of things. The book’s elegiac sweep, as Alan Gillis extends the tonal depth and lyric resonance of his work, is combined with dark humour, imaginative flights, rants, raves, and daring provocations. Dramatic and ruminative, the poems explore the threshold between inner and outer worlds, alert and inquisitive about what we lose and what abides. Spanning past and present, parenthood and childhood, what is here and what is gone, set-pieces and shorter lyrics range widely, yet keep returning to what is at the core of experience. Some poems are set in Ireland, some in Edinburgh. Many take a walk (sometimes a drive) through town or countryside, building up a head of steam, trying to come to terms with the state of oneself and the state of the world. But at all times life’s beauty and bruises are registered through a love of language, verve and commitment, mixing hurt with hope, empathy with oomph.Over Here is Alan Gillis’s fifth book with The Gallery Press.
Molly Twomey’s first collection, Raised Among Vultures, touched readers and listeners in uncommon ways. Reviewing it in Poetry Ireland’s Trumpet Annie Brown wrote that it ‘feels like a friend’. Chic to be Sad continues a young woman’s report from the front lines of experience. These fearless poems, rich in simile (a smile ‘wide / as a long weekend’) and striking detail, rest in ordinary settings — an ‘Online Staff Meeting’, an Aldi car park in Youghal.
Framed between work that centres on a fire in her family home this book displays an even wider range than her debut — from ‘My Brother’s Friends Draw Dicks’, ‘The Mechanic Speaks to My Boyfriend Over My Head’ and ‘Why We Don’t Have Kids’ it reaches to the Guggenheim Museum in Venice and considerations of art. There’s a constant sense of the aftermath of illness and the poems never shy from physical and emotional vulnerability. Brave in its honesty and directness, Chic to be Sad confirms a special gift and presence in Irish poetry before reaching its wise conclusion: ‘There is so much to know, / so much I want you to hear.’
