Tom French 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).
The Convent of Mercy is Tom French's eighth poetry collection published by The Gallery Press.
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Tom French’s latest collection, The Convent of Mercy (Gallery, €12.95pb, €19.50hb), takes place when “the centuries of modesty are past”. This is a contemplative, meditative book, but one still full of the clatter and bash of modernity.
Rather than retreating, French looks to reclaim moments of calm, or at least to take a clarifying step back, turning a packed suitcase into a wider metaphor: “You’ve hit, I think, on how we ought to live –/on the verge of departure, everything weighed” or three plasterers on a site in New York, who might be mistaken for “looking at nothing”, “until it dawned that they were utterly aware/of how beautifully they were moving as one/and felt no need to draw the least attention”.
There’s a sense, too, of being prey to larger forces, which animates and disturbs. In a poem about a digger in the opening sequence, The Back Field, the narrator is aware not only of what’s been lost, but of the possibility of further removals, and his own vulnerability in the face of them: “It took the willow we liked/to look at moving in the wind./If it had kept coming/there is nothing we could’ve done”.
Behind much of these poems’ urgency is a wish to bear tactile witness, most explicit in Writing the Names, which touches on the war in Ukraine and in which a villager “is gouging out the epic of her people” in rock. French has his own losses to attend to, also, and in two affecting poems he makes a pilgrimage to honour a lost brother, in “the last place he’d been alive on earth”, while a well-judged portrait of an uncle captures his attending the fights at London’s York Hall, before going home to “sleep enough to rise again at dawn/and go at the world again with his bare hands”.
— Declan Ryan, Ticket, The Irish Times
Book Information
Publication date: 17 July 2025
Details: 96pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91737 100 1
ISBN HBK: 978 1 91737 101 8
Cover:‘Sailor Torso (Hunting)’ (2013) by John Kindness, lime fresco on reinforced plaster
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