Jarlath Fahy joined the Focus Theatre Group where he studied the Stanislavski Method of Acting under Deirdre O’Connor. From acting and directing with Focus he relocated to Berlin where he joined the Berlin English Language Theatre.

On his return to Ireland he got involved with the Gung Ho Theatre Company at The King’s Head, Galway staging Lone Star and with the Taboo Theatre Company, touring with Willy Russell’s Stags and Hens.

When a student in NUIG his poetry appeared in Criterion, the Arts Society Magazine and in Outlet, the journal of the Philosophical Society. His poetry has since been published in Crannóg magazine, WOW! and in the collection during which nothing happens – the Writers Writing Live event of Galway’s Project ‘06 Festival. His first collection is The Man Who Was Haunted By Beautiful Smells.

"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

The Man Who Was Haunted By Beautiful Smells

Jarlath Fahy

76 pp   RRP€11.99  Online Price!   €9.99

ISBN 0-9552604-3-4