"refreshingly bold ...
a jongleur's verbal phantasmagoria, recalling the dark madness of nursery
rhymes.
Fahy has a vivid creative imagination and
a genuine and decent cynic touch ...
Throughout there is a meticulous attention to - and acknowledgement of - simple
human experience, the ordinariness and blandness of daily things, a tongue-in-cheek
belief in the fragile strengths of the most unremarkable events. Fahy's moral
eye is clear and he could well be one of the more exciting new poets on the
Galway scene.
A collection worth buying"
Kiosque
Review
"So many Irish poets have seemed to languish in the long shadows cast by Heaney and Longley. Jarlath Fahy is a million miles away from all that. His poems have an off the cuff freshness and quite perfectly create their own idiosyncratic universe.
A biting satire on relationships between men and women - sadness, anger
and raucous hilarity co-exist in the space of a few short lines. The other
Irish poet of whom Jarlath Fahy most reminds me is Paul Durcan. Like Durcan
he has a marvellous ability to dramatise his poems."
Kevin
Higgins
"The vast majority of Jarlath Fahy's poems are recognisably his own. In this collection he has achieved an unusual consistency in theme and subject matter. The poems hit off one another in such a way as to make reading them more enriching than encountering them in isolation.
Fahy is a committed writer, deeply engaged in
his material. Most of the poems here are an excavation of his childhood
and he imbues them with the authentic strength of received memory by
employing a myriad of highly particular images."
Michael
Gorman