Gallery Goes to WCLF: Tom French, Vona Groarke & Aifric Mac Aodha

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’. This is a bilingual collection with poems written in Irish/as Gaeilge by Aifric and translation into English by David Wheatley. David subscribing to Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation as an act of creative echoing, offers again a perfect complement to the original Irish-language poems.

Just as an infinity pool gives the illusion of one invisible edge, the dividing line between poems and the world they process can be magically tricky to discern. Infinity Pool, Vona Groarke’s ninth poetry collection and fifteenth book, tests the limits of spaces poems make for themselves. In language precise, luminous and spry, these poems write into the point where anything might slip into something else — the Atlantic become an actor; a luggage carousel be a reckoning; a poem nudge itself gently over its own fourth wall. From the author of work previously described as ‘exquisite, pitch-perfect’ (PN Review) and ‘for the ages’ (Dublin Review of Books), this is an ingenious, exhilarating collection from one of our foremost poets.

Convent of Mercy, Tom French’s first collection since his Pigott Prize winning Company (2022), displays a mastery of short poems and long embracing domestic and historic subject matter. ‘The Road from Schiphol’ may be his finest achievement. This new collection will be published in July 2025.

This event is supported by The Gallery Press