Day Release, Aidan Rooney-Céspedes’s first collection reveals an unusual maturity and singular scope. His widely published, prize-winning poems range from the rich imaginings of ‘Retro Creation’ through various locales — County Monaghan where he was born and raised, through Paris and the literary past, to North America where he now lives. As it blends the colloquial and the macaronic in an astonishing variety of forms, Day Release registers itself as the first entry of a lasting signature in contemporary Irish poetry.
‘His poems come freighted with deepening associations: memories of first jobs and a vanished pet . . . and conclude here, in ‘Safe Haven’, with a meditation on the lost histories of detritus found under suburban lawns.’ — Thomas Dillon Redshaw, New Hibernia Review