Imaginary Menagerie

Ailbhe Darcy's debut collection is a set of urgent despatches from her point of origin, Dublin, and from her skirmishes further afield: London, Paris, Africa, Eastern Europe or the States. Driven less by metaphor than by wild conceits, semantic leaps, and startling juxtapositions, these are poems that itch and pluck at the pelt of what we think we know. Darcy is an exuberant and inventive new presence in the poetry world. 'Ailbhe Darcy's work has a precision and purpose rare in one so young. Her poems turn up without a word out of place and are not content to just decorate the page with metaphors, but determined to communicate to the reader Darcy's vision of things as they are. Her words are sometimes soothing, sometimes brutal with her truths as she sees them. Never self-absorbed, she is a poet consumed by what the world around her is doing; it is this quality above all others which numbers her among the most promising new Irish poets' - Kevin Higgins. 'Here is a new writer for whom it is worth putting a kink in the usual niceties of the space-time continuum…quirkiness without archness, the bellybutton fluff of youth but the empty taxis and left-behind pubs and streets of the left-behind cities afterwards…The talent for splicing the heterogeneous together, cadavre exquis-style' -David Wheatley. 'A real find for Irish readers' -Dave Lordan, Arena, RTE Radio 1. '…a beguiling, sometimes baffling, yet unique slant on the world… Read the darkly beautiful and restrained sequence 'Unheimlich', which views familial trauma through a storytelling lens, and you get an idea as to what this writer can do' -Ben Wilkinson, Stride. '…a little dazzling glimpse of honest and original thought, a new discovery and a brief peek over a new horizon for British poetry' -Catherine Woodward, Scottish Poetry Review.