Old Friends

Much of Aifrin Mac Aodha's new collection is made of longer poems or sequences who individual parts possess the force of aphorisms. Drawing an old Irish sayings and idioms her often musical line ('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 n the horses in Friesland, her poems amplify what Clíona Ní Ríordáin has identified as '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 ceative echoing, offers again a perfect complement to them.