Ailbhe Darcy in the Irish Times

In the Irish Times this weekend, Borbála Faragó reviewed Critical Flame contributor / friend Ailbhe Darcy’s debut collection, Imaginary Menagerie (Bloodaxe Books, 64pp, £8.95):

Darcy's Imaginary Menagerie is a quirky and fresh debut collection that invites the reader into the intriguing inner world of the poet. Often enigmatic and ambiguous, but never self-absorbed or pointless, these poems create a refined metaphorical nexus where imagination plays the solo part. There are self-reflective poems that consider the poetic psyche with great ironic tenderness, such as The Mornings You Turn into a Grub , which compares the self to a “scrambled egg omelette . . . with a soft and runny interior . . . pure egg, all the way through”, or the brilliant Mrs Edgeway , which looks at a woman searching for her body’s map of consciousness: “I trace the veins, / try to find some thing of substance”.

Darcy is also a keen observer of the world around her: many of her poems comment on the widespread political violence to which we are all witnesses in the media on a daily basis and query humanity’s growing indifference. The sophisticated Animal Biscuits describes the infamous photograph of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and castigates the soldiers for “behaving as animals, violently absent from / your own photograph”. Darcy is a remarkable poet who combines a lithe metaphorical imagination with an enviable social sensitivity.