I have read less contemporary poetry this last year than I would have liked to. In 2025 I completed my PhD on constructions of childhood in modern Irish poetry, which looked at poetry from Yeats to the present day. While I worked my way to the land of the living, much of my reading this year was tunnel-visioned (the PhD being the tunnel) and as a result, I am self-conscious about my ability to provide any kind of comprehensive Irish Poetry Round-Up of 2025. Instead, what follows is a discussion of four books that I especially loved this year: Morsels by Susanna Galbraith (Macha), The Oasis by Charles Lang (Skein), After Party by Dean Browne (Picador) and Infinity Pool by Vona Groarke (Gallery). These are four very different, exciting works, with each poet demonstrating great control of the poetic line alongside an abiding interest in its limits.
Of course, these are not the only books that stood out in 2025; I would have liked to write more about, for example, Dane Holt’s Father’s Father’s Father (Carcanet), a beautiful meditation on the strangeness of grief, consistently mediated through taut poetic lines. Or Éireann Lorsung’s Pattern-book, also from Carcanet, which dwells on how ‘the antidote for chaos might be more chaos’; as a result, Lorsung considers how poetry’s obsession with patterning allows her to wrangle this chaos into shapes. Sam Furlong’s Crowd Work (Macha), another reflection on poetic composition, was especially moving; it is a stunning and skilled showcase of the amorphousness of the poetic line, which lends itself well to thinking about other constructed things, including gender. (See Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s review of Furlong’s collection in the most recent edition of Cyphers for a much more thorough and elegant description). Another 2025 highlight was Michael Dooley’s In Spring We Turned to Water (Doire), a sensitive and eerie lyric exploration of how our personal, historical and mythical pasts haunt us. Bebe Ashley’s Harbour Doubts (Banshee) was especially strong on loneliness and the difficulties of communication, drawing from her experience training as a British Sign Language interpreter. I was also delighted by the arrival of The End of Art (Fourteen Poems), a pamphlet from Zara Meadows, who is one of the most exciting young voices writing on this island, I think.
2025 also brought us the gift of new collections by established experts of the craft: I thoroughly enjoyed the musicality of Moya Cannon’s Bunting’s Honey (Carcanet), which traces how personal geographies are shaped by the environments around them, as well as Enda Wyley’s Sudden Light (Dedalus), which had me looking at Dublin, where I live, from different and surprising angles. I also urge everyone to read Tom Paulin’s Namanlagh (Faber), which revisits the well-trodden poetic grounds of Belfast and Donegal through a speaker grappling with late-life depression. Vulnerable and beautiful, these poems — as always with Paulin’s work — deeply engage with the complicated question of national identity on this island.
This question of the national came up again and again throughout my reading this year. Take Rafael Mendes Silva’s The Migrant Dictionary (Howl), one of the 2025 winners of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Pamphlet Prize, where each poem is formatted like a dictionary entry. One piece reads:
Irishness noun.
We are sorry. Irishness is a disputed and evolving term. Please try again later.
Though Silva is addressing a contemporary and worrying far-right turn in Ireland, ‘Irishness’ has always been a ‘disputed and evolving term’, in poetry and elsewhere. The difficulty of this definition was apparent to me while writing this review, as I circled around a question that I know I cannot answer: what makes a poem Irish? For this reason, I found myself particularly interested in the work of presses such as Macha and Skein, which address these questions head-on and put pressure on what ‘Irish poetry’ might mean.
Morsels
Susanna Galbraith
Macha Press, £15.99
Galbraith’s first full-length collection, Morsels, is published by Macha Press, a cross-border publishing initiative launched in Belfast in 2024. As with all Macha’s publications, Morsels is beautifully presented: you open it like you would a present, a sheath of paper enwrapping its square, boxy shape. Macha Press collections are characterised by an interest in the ‘formally hybrid’ and Morsels is no exception. The thirteen-page poem sequence it opens with reads like a cross between prose-poem and an extremely self-conscious fable. The speaker resembles a more weathered Little Red Riding Hood; this is not her first walk in the woods, evidenced by how the poem starts, as if in the middle of something—
It was fear I was afraid of. The woods had started to resemble bears. Can we be extra
gentle with each other? I said.
Instead of bears I tried to think about you.
We have all the makings of a story already: setting, characters, dialogue and some kind of conflict. But as the poem progresses, the conflict is revealed as something too nebulous to be solved or even defined; it is not just that the speaker wants to make her way home unharmed, but that the fear that lingers in the woods follows her everywhere, because it reflects more persistent, existential concerns. As she puts it:
All the way home I broke the silence into crumbs and was ashamed. You shouldn’t
take the woods so personally.
‘Bears’ uses repetition to enact this shame, reading like a warped sestina. It dwells on ideas of hunger and desire, using (largely) the same words throughout but assembling them differently on each page, which finally gives the effect of the poem beginning to eat itself. Take a later section, which begins:
It was fear I was afraid of. The bears had started to resemble my mother.
Can we be extra gentle with each other? I said.
The poem explores what happens when the oft-didactic logic of the fable begins to close in on itself: what if it is not just strangers that you cannot trust, but those closest to you, even yourself? Galbraith plays with mimicry and difference until the very end of ‘Bears’: while each page borrows its words from another, no two pages look the same, the lines structured slightly differently in each instance. ‘Bears’ ends much how it began, with a speaker who is afraid, overwhelmed and stuck:
I broke the silence into crumbs and was lost
you shouldn’t take me so personally
Morsels as a whole reads like a poetic form of breadcrumbing, readers led from one page to the next by scrap-size clues, but never really brought to resolution.
The collection is a fascinating meditation on how we are trapped within both the stories we are told and the ones that we tell ourselves. It is interested in the tension between the family and the self, as exemplified by the epigraph to its second section, a line from a poem entitled ‘Waiting for my Daughter’, written by Susanna Galbraith’s own mother, Janet Galbraith, and first published in the Honest Ulsterman in 1998. There is a striking intertextuality here: not only is Morsels’ meaning shaped by another text, but the text in question is itself about waiting for the birth of Morsels’ author.
This tension between creator and created works like a refrain throughout the book’s second section, entitled ‘something the birds mean’. What exactly these birds ‘mean’ we will never know, but neither does Galbraith, as she works through several possibilities in the thirteen poems which follow. In ‘bird conversation’, ‘the birds mean — forgiveness’; in ‘birthday wish’, the speaker is, (with indebtedness to Nellie Furtado), herself ‘like a bird’; and in ‘my mother had started to resemble birds’, the birds are … well, you get the pattern. Perpetual shirking of meaning can make poetry frustrating to read, but Galbraith grounds her elusiveness in concrete and convincing images, always giving the reader something to grab onto. Take, for example, one of the most beautiful metaphors I have read all year, from ‘when my love was a rabbit’ — ‘a tooth is a lesson / in what you can bear to lose’. Or the final poem of the second section, ‘thank you’, which reads:
for believing every pebble is an egg
that won’t hatch in your lifetime
but that you will warm in your pocket nonetheless.In this way you’ve taught me how to live enormously –
full of what breaks, and breaks, and breaks.
Morsels is interested in what happens during the process of breaking, which, for Galbraith, is always an active state. It is, for example, where a lot of the strength of her poetic lines are harnessed: at their breaks. Take, for example, how the six-line end words (including the title) of ‘thank you’ communicate a shortened version of the whole. ‘you’, ‘egg’, ‘lifetime’, ‘nonetheless’, ‘enormously’ ‘breaks’; in other words, you have given me something that lasts a lifetime but nonetheless is always, enormously breaking. Fitting, then, that by the time we reach the collection’s final words, concluding a multi-page long poem, ‘as though an island’, we are confronted again with what it means: ‘to break’. Here again, Galbraith homes in on a fraction of the whole, interested in how meaning is gleaned from fragments. Each poem in Morsels is one piece of a fascinating multi-solution, or perhaps unsolvable, puzzle.
The Oasis
Charles Lang
Skein Press, €12.00
Lang’s debut collection begins with a bang, or rather, a shout: ‘Aw it takes is a wee “fuck the polis” n a night aw excitement is on’. This is ‘The Chase’, a near cinematic walkthrough a city at night, following a group of young ones ‘hidin in bushes, // under motors, behind wheelie bins’ ‘Incognito.’ But Lang wants you to see them, to really look. As the speaker says himself:
Watch this. We’re walkin right doon the street right past the polis
casual as, no givin a fuck, n ma pal turns roon n says ‘awright officerswit yees been up tae the night?’
This is a book all about watching. But it is also a book about listening. The first thing a reader might notice upon opening this collection is that it is written in Lang’s native Glaswegian dialect; the words look how they sound, written phonetically.
While The Oasis has frequently been described as an urban book, you could just as easily describe it as a book of poems interested in nature, or perhaps, as a book that refuses to take any piece of our environment for granted. Take, for example, ‘Ormeau Road: July Evening’. While it is set in Belfast, it quickly takes us much further afield:
Through the windae ae oor flat I take it in:
chihuahuas lickin an empty bowl,
sister pushin her wee brother in a pram.
There’s glory in this day but still a sleepless night.
In the mornin the trains go oan strike
n the arctic
is melti
n
Here and elsewhere, Lang reminds us of the perpetual relevance of the climate crisis. There is no earthly environment, or moment, that is protected from the reality of our diminishing resources: it is there in the emptiness of the chihuahuas’ bowl, the train strike of the poem’s final lines, and the breakdown of the word ‘meltin’ itself.
Lang’s poetry is ultimately interested in how language adapts to its surroundings. I attended a reading once in which he was asked when his poems ‘would be translated into English?’ I think even the person who asked this knew, as soon as they heard it out loud, how off base this question was and how much it misses the point of these poems. That such questions are still asked underscores the urgency and necessity of collections like Lang’s, which combat any monolithic understanding of what counts as proper ‘English’, and by delayed extension, of what counts as literature.
It is no coincidence, for example, that this book of poetry rendered in working-class Glaswegian dialect is published by Skein Press, a Dublin-based publishing house which supports writers ‘traditionally underrepresented in Irish literature’. In doing so, its publications tend to interrogate what exactly a phrase like ‘Irish literature’ might mean.
How to classify, then, a poet like Lang? While born and raised in Glasgow, much of the development of Lang’s poetic voice has taken place in Ireland; he lived, studied and worked in Belfast — and briefly Dublin — for several years, too before returning to Glasgow. As a result, the formal makeup of his poems is influenced, at least in part, by a tradition of Irish lyric poetry.
‘Death of a Field’, titled after Paula Meehan’s poem of the same name, is one such obvious example:
The death ae a field
is the start ae new hooses
n the end ae dags aff the lead
Nae mer daffodils or bonfires
or weans huvin watter fights in summer.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the field’s ‘death’ is framed firstly through gain rather than loss. Like Meehan, Lang is interested in the repercussions of this death on the region’s wildlife and social life. But publishing twenty years later, Lang is also writing from a time of heightened housing crisis, where the preservation of the natural must be held in tension with the stark need for more homes. He complicates the nature poem, considering the class politics of the development. In the poem’s second stanza, the speaker recalls the exclusivity of the dens they built as kids in the field—‘Nae lassies – men only’—before the final lines give an ambiguous re-building of community:
Oan the scaffold, the workies’ radio plays
all your favourite songs all day long.
Brick by brick they lay a home.
Time and time again, The Oasis prompts us to consider the place of the nature poem within the ecological and sociological inequalities of the contemporary climate. Nature is never observed from a distance in this collection: it is something we are always in relation to and which we should never take for granted.
Another poem, ‘Daydream’, imagines what an unnamed city might look like in years to come. While it suggests that ‘Someday / rockets will colonise Saturn’, it is not progress but slowness that feels like the most radical of all acts:
I’d like tae think in time
the grass will continue tae grow,
though as the sayin goesit’s never any better
oan the other side.
Humans living in space seems less unimaginable than continually growing grass on earth, a timely reflection on the current state of the world; last year was, after all, the year of the much-publicised Blue Origin celebrity-filled space flight. The Oasis draws attention to the excess at the heart of so much of our daily practice and asks us to dream smaller, not bigger, using the poem’s economy of words to make this point convincingly. Lang puts this best himself, in ‘Daydream’, where he conveys what I am trying to:
Which is tae say
the truth is somethinonly days cin dream
intae words.
After Party
Dean Browne
Picador, £12.99
One of the last letters published in Seamus Heaney’s Collected Letters (Faber, 2023) is addressed to a young poet, one Dean Browne, a then-seventeen-year-old schoolboy who wrote to the Nobel Laureate. In his response, Heaney names a ‘real resilience’ in Browne’s approach to poetry. The arrival of After Party, Browne’s first full-length collection, published nearly fifteen years after this epistolatory exchange, proves this assessment to be true. (Fitting, as well, that it is published the same year as Faber’s much-anticipated Collected Poems of Seamus Heaney edited by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis.)
After Party is a special book. As many critics have already noted, this is a debut that does not feel like one; it is fully formed, sophisticated and has an immense sense of follow-through. Browne’s approach to writing memory feels at once mature and surprising. Take, for example, ‘Butternut Squash’, where the speaker’s vegetable chopping prompts recollection, somehow, of ‘how it felt to slide shoeless on / the cherrywood floor of a childhood / bedroom’. Here, and across the collection, cooking serves as a metaphor for the exactness of poetic language, the ever-elusive process of finding the words. The poem’s final lines read:
I am cubing the squash
as precisely as I can, as if
somewhere it’s not too late
to describe these things. To try.
We feel not only the immense difficulty of description but also its necessity. As its title suggests, After Party is concerned with the fact of the after—with the bits that follow what came before. Or, as its opening poem ‘Aide-Mémoire’ asks: ‘What am I meant to remember?’ Sometimes Browne’s speakers recall things that never happened. The entirety of the poem ‘It cannot be salvaged’, for example, reads:
Make me scrambled eggs,
she never said.
I will so, I said,
and never did.
The things that never happened produce an absence; we cannot salvage a closeness that was never fully realised. The collection continually returns to this sense of inherent distance within relationships—Browne is as interested in recording the disconnects between people as their kinship.
Though the images and references in this collection are at times obscure, they are never isolating. One of After Party’s strengths is the way it makes the cryptic image feel, somehow, familiar. Take ‘Quiche’, one of the weirder poems in the collection. Its fourth stanza reads:
A fly on the wall is enough company for a lifetime,
my mother insisted, while I stood above her on a stool
tending that fuse box. She wore black all the time now.
She kept spilling Lucozade on the dachshund on her lap.
The first line has the tone and conviction of a truism, except for the fact that it’s not really true; any sense of ‘company’ is undercut by the loneliness and stifled energy of the rest of the stanza. The stalled fuse box is accompanied by the bamboozling image of a mother spilling Lucozade on a dachshund, which I somehow believe.
Perhaps this is because the inscrutability of Browne’s images never feels like a trick being played on the reader, or a flaunting of the writer’s intelligence. Rather, it brings us into a kind of discombobulation as a shared state between reader and writer alike. Deane reminds us that the process of reading poetry is an active one, that, to borrow again from ‘Aide-Mémoire’, there is an implicit agreement between reader and speaker ‘to try to decide where, if anywhere, all this might connect’. After Party is propelled by an urgency to seek connection between unlikely things and places, an ethos which feels particularly important in response to our broken, fragmented world. This is a collection interested in how we can write out of the rubble.
In the book’s second poem, ‘Shadow Box’, readers are given a description of the titular ‘after party’, or at least, one version of it: the afterlife. Browne sets this version of after, ‘when we’re gone’ in its most literal topography: a ‘draughty, sunless place’, the ‘carnival / of corners’ that is, presumably, the coffin. Even this ending, death itself, is not a dead end. In the final stanza, Browne presents us with a playfully morbid final stanza, that breeds some kind of hope, if a skewed version of it:
A bald doll looking down
from its circle, one eye
turned back into the skull,
fixed on the future. Yours.
Time and time again, these poems ask us: what will you do with after? In presenting us with a myriad of potential options and images, Browne suggests that while the future is anyone’s guess, it’s also, to some extent, always yours.
Infinity Pool
Vona Groarke
Gallery Press, €11.95
Expansive is the word that first comes to mind whilst reading Vona Groarke’s latest (and fourteenth) book, Infinity Pool, published by Gallery Press. The collection begins in motion, with a poem entitled ‘Stansted to Knock, December 21st, set in an airplane in flight. Fitting, then, that the collection begins on a verb, with the lines: ‘Floored by clouds so dense you think you / could hopscotch over them, no problem’. The speaker is ‘floored’ in multiple senses: astounded, perhaps, but also literally cushioned by clouds that act as the ground beneath the plane. This is a temporary flooring, though; the plane lands, and shortly before the landing, the speaker experiences a moment of immense presence:
Here I am open, riddled with light,
my full year split like a pomegranate,
all its days beaded like seeds,
no, not seeds, like quartz
on a passage tomb the rising sun
had flicked to light this morning,a light I myself am so in need of,
for my soul (for lack of a better word)
This opening poem reads like its own yearly review of the self, like an AGM for the soul (for lack of a better word). It is a stunning and self-conscious reflection on those rare moments of self-clarity that occur ‘maybe once a year’ and the difficulty of transcribing the self onto the page. What to make, for example, of the poet continuing to test out metaphors throughout this final version: days not quite like pomegranate seeds, moreso like ‘quartz / on a passage tomb’? The poem works itself out in front of its readers, Groarke always flagging the seams of the finished piece.
In so many of Groarke’s poems, the process of their fabrication is the content. For instance, the title poem, ‘Infinity Pool’, traces how an idea for an image had in the night has magicked its way into a book of poems:
And I am folding it now, this pool,
corner to corner, line to line,
so as to carry about with me
its deep blue scrap of lie.But carrying folded water
isn’t feasible. You know that.
Groarke publicly tests in front of her readers the limits of her own metaphor, the perfect impossibility of it as description. This is clear, too, in ‘Introduction’, a failed poem in the sense that it is interested itself in when and why a poem fails. It narrates the speaker’s discovery of a 1951 telegram, addressed to Isaiah Berlin from ‘Elizabeth’ (presumably his second wife) demanding he ring her as soon as possible. The urgency and drama of the telegram are obvious grounds for a poem. And yet, as the speaker herself notes, ‘I’d read this poem for you now, except I can’t: it doesn’t exist: I haven’t written it.’ And why not? Because
the telegram has nothing to do with me and wants nothing to do with me and I admit that
no matter how I try, I’m unable to sweet-talk it into a poem written by me.
Is this a prose poem or simply a piece of prose that has snuck into a book of poems? We might remember that the invisible boundaries of the infinity pool recall the constraints and overflow of the poetic line itself. It seems fitting that a collection from the Ireland Chair of Poetry, and a master of the form, is so concerned with, as one title puts it, ‘The Future of the Poem’. Here, she asks readers to consider the poem as a sort of abstract, singular entity, to ‘Imagine it a page in a book / rubbing up against other pages.’ Easy enough, since this is normally how a poem is presented to us. But what happens when we
Then imagine that book
without this page.
Would you call it a loss?
In this conception of the poem as an almost-absence, I am reminded of one of my favourite poems, Heaney’s ‘St. Kevin and the Blackbird’, in which he reminds his readers half-way through: ‘And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow, / Imagine being Kevin’. Both poems share an acknowledgement that drawing attention to the fabric of a poem need not be at the expense of its sincerity; the poetic line can juggle performance and probity.
Towards the end of ‘The Future of the Poem’, Groarke puts these strains in conversation with each other:
Cut into it another word.
See how white space, its silences,
persist?
Let that other word be ‘love’,
the whole poem strained
through the mould of the o
at the very heart of it.
For all the questioning of the form, function and future of the poem, Groarke’s verse always communicates its underlying faith in what the poem can and will do, ‘at the very heart of it’.
In her inaugural address as Ireland’s Professor of Poetry, delivered last year, Groarke discusses poetry’s unique ability to tell some kind of truth, urgently important in our contemporary political landscape of ‘prevailing untruth’. She cites a host of examples:
When empathy is declared the fundamental weakness of western civilisation (according to Elon Musk) …
When people refer to Ireland ‘being full’…
When being pro-Palestinian is equated with being antisemitic…
If this global moment is marked by widespread dissemination of lies, all four of the collections this review has covered show an acute awareness of the poet’s duty to exactitude of language. They speak to the importance of trying to say exactly what it is that you mean and the repercussions of failing. I’m struck again by Browne’s ‘Butternut Squash’ as apt here; what all of the poetry I have discussed shares is a certain allegiance to imagining the world
as if
somewhere it’s not too late
to describe these things. To try.