Old Friends (paperback)

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.