Much of Aifric Mac Aodha’s new collection, Old Friends, 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. From ‘a lad in a tattoo parlour’ and a ‘woman vet on television’ to a cyst on a spinal cord and a series centred on the horses in Friesland, her poems amplify what Clíona Ní Ríordáin has identified as ‘a strong female, feminist voice endowed with a canny sense of the unheimlich’. David Wheatley, subscribing to Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation as an act of creative echoing, offers again a perfect complement to them.
Aifric Mac Aodha’s first collection, Gabháil Syrinx, was published in 2010. Her first bilingual collection, Foreign News, with translations by David Wheatley, was published by The Gallery Press in 2017. She lives in Dublin where she works for the Irish-language publisher, An Gúm.
David Wheatley was born in Dublin. He has published four collections with The Gallery Press and two with Carcanet Press, the most recent of which, Child Ballad, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. A widely published critic, he now lives in Scotland with his family and teaches at the University of Aberdeen.
