Alvy Carragher
Alvy Carragher grew up by the River Shannon in Galway and Tipperary and has since lived in Louisiana, Dublin, South Korea, and Canada. She is currently based in Dublin. Her previous collections, Falling in love with broken things (2016) and The men I keep under my bed (2021), were published by Salmon Poetry. She has also published a children’s novel, The Cantankerous Molly Darling (2019). What Remains the Same, her first collection with The Gallery Press, was published in 2024. She is a recipient of an Arts Council Literary Bursary and has an MA in Writing from the University of Galway. She was awarded Poetry Ireland’s Eavan Boland Award in 2025 and, in 2026, the David Whyte Poet in Residence Award. Her poem ‘Neither of Us Asks the Other’s Name’ from her forthcoming collection, The Only Fear I’ve Ever Had is Standing Still (October 2026), won the Listowel Writers’ Week’s Single Poem Award.
What Remains the Same
Shortlisted for the 2025 Farmgate National Poetry Award
The past stamps its foot
like a small child.
— ‘Forgive Me’
In Alvy Carragher’s compelling new collection, What Remains the Same, journeys are strivings to escape. Rooms hold ‘the shadow / of an old home, another country’ while, in the book’s title poem, a young woman ‘must swallow pain, remain silent. / This is the shape of her life.’ History hounds the writer’s heels and ancient hurts return as she searches for a voice and for forgiveness.
These poems contain a gamut of emotions — from the kindness of a stranger on an aeroplane to ‘Aftermath’ in which a character ‘wanted to hurt him’. 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.
