The award to Aifric Mac Aodha of the 2017 Oireachtas Prize for Poetry confirmed her position in the vanguard of younger Irish women poets. From a stony-faced DJ with ‘a canny eye’ to a Greek nymph renowned for her chastity, Foreign News, poems in Irish with translations into English by David Wheatley is a book whose reach and aims are evident in its richly allusive sequences.
In matching her sense of play and her use of idiom David Wheatley proves himself a perfect counterpart for Aifric Mac Aodha’s poems that resound with longing and a modern sensibility.
ar chéadteacht dom i dtír:
leor liom an seomra ar cíos;
ní hacmhainn dom dul siar
I set my ship ablaze
at the first safe landing:
a rented room does for me these days;
home thoughts couldn’t be more foreign.
With Foreign News, Peter Fallon has now published under the Gallery imprint a trio of women poets writing in Irish (Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Ailbhe Ní Ghearrbhuigh, Aifric MacAodha), each embodying an “écriture féminine” in Irish. MacAodha is a welcome addition to this canon: a strong female, feminist voice, endowed with a canny sense of the unheimlich, whose poetry enriches our literary life, both at home and “out foreign”. — Cliona Ní Ríordáin, The Irish Times
Book Information
Year Published: 2017
Details: 72pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91133 728 7
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91133 729 4
Cover: ‘Seville’ by James Hanley, courtesy of the artist
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