Poetry review – A GRAIN OF TRUTH : Colin Carberry admires Celia de Freine’s bilingual collection exploring the plight of the disadvantaged and marginalised
Focal den Fhírinne / A Grain of Truth
Celia de Freine
Arlen House
ISBN: 9781851323227
$19.95
This bilingual (Irish-English) collection of poetry, de Fréine’s eleventh, consists of 40 poems, only one of which is more than a page-and-a-half in length. It explores themes of loss, poverty, the impulse to flee undesirable or dangerous places and situations, the uncertain nature of reality, and a ceaseless attempt to sift ‘truth’—or versions, grains, of it—from appearances. Time and again we are presented with a scene, a picture, a veneer, only to discover, as in life, that things are not as we thought or expected them to be. Politicians, reporters, clerics, family members, friends, lovers, lie—but we also deceive ourselves: things we once believed without question turn out to be false, and as a result our perception of ‘reality’ also changes. Faith, too, is often depicted as a consoling fiction designed to gull us into believing we will have a better time of it in the afterlife.
‘What is Captured’, the book’s sobering opening poem, reveals that a mother and her child have been dealt a bad hand by life: ‘disappointment will spread through the room, / shutting them into a future no bigger / than the camera placed before them.’ The ‘child’ (curiously, the word is used three times in the poem) is dressed in ‘hand-me-down’s’ and her mother can’t even buy her a second-hand doll. The speaker ‘would like her life and that of her child / to remain as captured today’, ‘but knows’ that this idealized moment will be their happiest. The camera shutter clicks, ‘shutting them into a future no bigger / than the camera placed before them.’ Poverty is a trap (they are ‘captured’) that dehumanizes and degrades, and in too many cases determines one’s destiny. Not because poor people cannot rise above their circumstances, but because poverty beats down and inflicts such a stigma that it turns daily life into a struggle for survival. This is why so many homeless, exhausted and disillusioned by violence and bureaucratic indifference, succumb to substance abuse or suicide. There is a long road between what the speaker ‘would like’ for her and her child and their lived reality and expectations for the future.
This sense of powerlessness and impulse to abscond from undesirable situations is explored uin numerous other poems, in which the words ‘freedom’ and ‘escape’ feature frequently. And these poems’ short, taut forms (mainly unrhymed couplets and three-line tercets) serve to accentuate a claustrophobic atmosphere of limited space and opportunities—which in turn mimic the cramped living conditions, permeated by the dank permafog of diminished expectations, in which many of the characters find themselves. Take the opening line of ‘Flight’ (which suggests both fleeing one’s current situation and taking a flight): ‘As you escape you think of what lies / ahead – the opportunities, the comfort.’ Note how the poet cleverly breaks up the words ‘lies’ and ‘ahead’ to suggest that escape, in the broad existential sense, is a mirage. De Fréine may have had in mind Irish folks forced to travel abroad in search of economic opportunity—after all, there is nothing more Irish than leaving Ireland—but beyond the heartache and tribulations that follow, ultimately, no matter what may be achieved in the new world, the person who has fled has no control over what happens or is said about them in ‘the place abandoned’. This poignant eight-line piece, a marvel of compression, speaks to a universal urge to pursue freer, more favourable social circumstances.
Of course, in the final analysis, the mere concept of freedom is a chimera. We linger between the newborn’s cries and the death rattle, but there is no escaping Buddha’s ‘old age, sickness and death.’ And in ‘Conversations’ de Fréine references the Anti-D travesty (Fiacha Fola, 2004, and its translation Blood Debts, 2014) in which 1600 Irish women contracted Hepatitis C as a result of the negligence of a Government Department. De Fréine writes that each time similar tragedies come to light, she at least enjoys the right of reply in it.
Newtownards-born de Fréine, who divides her time between Dublin and Connemara, writes in Irish and English and is no stranger to the linguistic and political intricacies, joys and dangers of operating in both tongues. This hasn’t always worked in her favour in Ireland, where the bulk of scribblers tend to fall into one or other camp. In an interview with Lia Mills published in the Irish University Review, she states: ‘Very often when I mention to an English-language writer that I’m writing a book in Irish I see his/her eyes glaze over. Irish language writers seem mystified at times as to why I would bother writing in English.’ Notwithstanding this, the poet continues to work her own sometimes lonely furrow, because for her the case is not one of pick a side or risk being deemed suspect; rather, as a writer raised and schooled in Irish and English, she belongs to and trespasses freely between both major linguistic and literary traditions. (I should clarify here that the English is a translation and the two languages compliment each other.) However, just as a parent often secretly indulges one child over the other, while giving the appearance of cherishing both the same, de Fréine slightly favors Irish. In the same interview, she elaborates on this theme, while also providing valuable insight into her creative process: ‘Very often the idea for a poem comes to me as an image and I jot down the idea and proceed. I’ve also felt that, as Irish is more a language ‘of the people’ it’s better suited to the surreal nature of my poetry and that through it I can more successfully mine the stuff of my imagination.’
Certainly, many of these poems contain elements of surrealism, when the rules of art and the rules of life don’t always square. However, the book is also rooted in and inspired by true, often unjust, events, and the characters in it tend to be working class, then go on to attend schools or gain employment in institutions in which they continue to be stigmatized as a result of that same background. To steal her phrase, de Fréine is very much ‘of the people’ and when she trains her clear, fearless eye on Irish society she begins from the ground up: in the tenement yards and back alleys of (mainly) urban Ireland. This does not make her a political poet, or that flaky, secretly despised creature—the self-anointed ‘voice of the voiceless’; rather, her empathy with and understanding of the lives of materially less fortunate folks derive from her lived experience. In an interview with Shauna Gilligan on her debut book of short stories, Even Still (Arlen House, 2025), de Fréine comments on the aspect of place in her work: ‘Both of the houses were places in which I spent time; both were places of insecurity. The former is a flat in a house in Rathmines during my early years, and from which we could have been evicted at a moment’s notice; the latter is my grandmother’s house in a seaside town in Northern Ireland where I spent my childhood summers, knowing the fun and happiness would end when summer drew to a close…Another place that permeates the stories is the past, L.P. Hartley’s ‘another country’ where, in this case, there were few opportunities for girls and women.’
Indeed, the subjects of these poems are overwhelmingly women or girls—mostly powerless, mute figures who dream of escaping from circumstances or relationships in which they are economically trapped, sexually abused, or have their futures or future prospects determined by authority figures, chauvinism or moral and social opprobrium. Female powerlessness and the impulse to flee oppressive situations are explored in multiple other poems. In ‘The Philanthropist’, a predatory waiter wishes to bed a woman whom he imagines seeks food for herself, only to discover that the food she collects is for homeless children. Likewise, in ‘The Meteorologist’s Woman, the female speaker’s abusive partner (who also feeds her in return for sex), promises her that once she has seen the moon ‘in all its glory’, ‘he will release her’—again highlighting this constant desire to escape. Tiring of the abuse she endures at the meteorologist’s hands, the woman eventually ‘packs her suitcase’ and flees his clutches and broken promises. In ‘The White Board’, a schoolgirl, sexually assaulted by her male guardian and bullied by her classmates
…had been warned time and again
if doubt were cast on her background
or if she hinted at what went on
between them, they would have to move
and if they did she would not be allowed
to attend school in the next town.
Bullied into silence, the girl writes on the board in class: Im afraid the man in the chec shirt is going to kill me. With predictable, rather ominous results: \
Her sentence remained there until
erased by the cleaners while readying
the room for the following term –
by which time there was
neither sight nor sound of the girl.
Note the double use of the word ‘sentence’: the girl’s existence is worse than a jail term.
De Fréine’s universe is confusing and dangerous, but even more so for women and girls. In ‘The Dog’, the speaker, another young girl, knows death for the first time, in the form of the corpse of a dog killed by a car. But it’s merely the first in a series of shocks (the girl loses her grandfather and is tasked with informing her father) and disappointments—again deriving from poverty:
…when the teacher screeches at her that
a mouse has left its mark on her copybook,
when the shopkeeper says she hasn’t enough money
to pay for the loaf of bread, when her mother tells
her there’s no candle left for her to do her homework.
In fact, the female characters in the book appear to be traumatized, hypervigilant, their powers of perception attuned to an inbuilt radar constantly scanning for signs of menace or danger. This is particularly true when it comes to authority figures and institutions. In ‘The Reward’, for example, in which an aura of terror prevails, the characters learn that helping others can prove a precarious endeavour. In this case, the young girl after turning in a lost purse to the police and receiving ‘a ten-shilling note as thank you’, petrified, she discovers her kind action wasn’t enough to compensate ‘…for the terror she felt when handing / the purse to the policeman at the station / her eye level with his holstered gun’. This theme is fleshed out in the ironically titled ‘You’re Not Bothered’, in which the adult speaker weighs the natural impulse to help others in distress against the danger of being used and possibly lured into a life threatening situation. Screams outside the window late at night could be young drunk revellers, but the speaker is also aware that ‘high jinks’ can quickly explode into ‘a full blown flight’—that life can quickly turn violent. As the speaker lies there, unable to sleep, she wonders what she would do ‘…if a girl in her / underwear pounded on your door, screaming / she had been held in a dungeon for years…’, but quickly recalls ‘…the girl who bumped into in / the street and stole your purse, the guy who / threatened you with a knife in the pub / the person who broke into your house and murdered your cat.’
Political or internecine violence, in so much as it impacts upon uninvolved noncombatants, is also explored throughout the book. In ‘The Piano’, inspired by an event during the Irish War of Independence, we see civilians caught up in the hatred and passionate ferocity of war. Art is not much comfort in such a bleak scenario, but as fire engulfed their street, ‘…words from the songs she might have / played rose above them…’ The female speaker in ‘The History Lesson’ is a foreign tourist that a hotel manager, one of the few middle class characters in this book, tries to talk out of visiting the Museum of Revolution. Why rake through all that nonsense / that happened centuries ago? this member of ‘fallen nobility’ asks, but the woman’s aim is to ‘understand the living’ – through analysis of the past. Indeed, his could be said for the majority of the poems, but ‘the living’ here refers to the descendents of those who, when economic pressure and injustice became unbearable, ‘…stormed the mansions / of the rich, plundered their contents / imprisoned their owners, tried them in / mock courts, condemned them to death…’ The poor are always, and preferably, invisible, an afterthought for the ruling classes, except, of course, when they are storming the ramparts. This doesn’t mean that de Fréine is a radical Marxist, but she is most interested in the stories and struggles of ‘ordinary’ people, while remaining keenly aware that one of the greatest lessons of history is that of class struggle.
As with the book’s opening poem, the concluding one, ‘The Town Crier’, ends on a tragic note. De Fréine uses the simplest of words to form short lines that have the capacity to induce instant heartbreak: ‘Ever since her mother disappeared, / the girl watches / from the window, keeping / tabs on who comes and goes.’ Ever since her mother disappeared: this is an astonishing statement, typical of this skilled and versatile poet who possesses the rare knack of packing so much into one line. You never know where she is going to go next. She leaves her readers in a nether state between knowing a certain amount but not quite enough. Why did the girl’s mother disappear? Did she abandon the girl? Was she abducted by some weirdo and strangled? Or was she a victim of ‘political’ violence, like Jean McConville, whose body was secretly buried and later found on a Louth beach in 2003. What we know is that a small girl is in her house struggling to process the loss of her mother—something we can relate to and deeply commiserate with. The world the girl looks out at is cruel, indifferent, silent. She is so desperate for news of ‘what / befell her mother’ that when she sees her adult neighbour return with a newspaper he looks to her ‘…as though the troubles of the world / were stored next to his heart…’ There appears to be no ambiguity in the book’s final line, no cathartic resolution–‘Hear ye! / Hear ye! The world is going from bad to worse’—but although the poems tackle a wide variety of issues that span decades and traverse continents some hope can be found between the lines.
It is difficult to sustain the argument that the recipient of multiple prizes and writing bursaries, including The Patrick Kavanagh Award, over the course of a long and stellar writing career, could be viewed as anything but an unmitigated success. But reading through Celia De Fréine’s oeuvre, which comprises librettos, poetry, plays, screenplays, short stories and translations, in addition to critical essays in Irish and English, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she is deserving of even more, and wider, recognition. I consider her to be one of Ireland’s finest and most versatile writers.
Colin Carberry was born in Toronto and spent his childhood in Lanesboro, Co. Longford, Ireland. He now lives in Mexico with his wife and two daughters. He is the author of the poetry collections The Green Table (2003), Ceasefire in Purgatory (2007) and Ghost Homeland: Selected Poems (2020), and is the translator of Love Poems by Jaime Sabines (Biblioasis, 2011), along with an earlier volume of Sabines’s verse. His poems have appeared in anthologies, journals and newspapers in North America, Europe, and Asia, and have been translated into many languages. He was Writer in Residence at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island in July 2015, and has been awarded Writers’ Bursaries by the Ontario Arts Council. Colin has read from his work on radio and television, and at book fairs, embassies, festivals, prisons, and universities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, Serbia, Slovenia, and the United States.
Apr 29 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Celia de Freine
Poetry review – A GRAIN OF TRUTH : Colin Carberry admires Celia de Freine’s bilingual collection exploring the plight of the disadvantaged and marginalised
Focal den Fhírinne / A Grain of Truth
Celia de Freine
Arlen House
ISBN: 9781851323227
$19.95
This bilingual (Irish-English) collection of poetry, de Fréine’s eleventh, consists of 40 poems, only one of which is more than a page-and-a-half in length. It explores themes of loss, poverty, the impulse to flee undesirable or dangerous places and situations, the uncertain nature of reality, and a ceaseless attempt to sift ‘truth’—or versions, grains, of it—from appearances. Time and again we are presented with a scene, a picture, a veneer, only to discover, as in life, that things are not as we thought or expected them to be. Politicians, reporters, clerics, family members, friends, lovers, lie—but we also deceive ourselves: things we once believed without question turn out to be false, and as a result our perception of ‘reality’ also changes. Faith, too, is often depicted as a consoling fiction designed to gull us into believing we will have a better time of it in the afterlife.
‘What is Captured’, the book’s sobering opening poem, reveals that a mother and her child have been dealt a bad hand by life: ‘disappointment will spread through the room, / shutting them into a future no bigger / than the camera placed before them.’ The ‘child’ (curiously, the word is used three times in the poem) is dressed in ‘hand-me-down’s’ and her mother can’t even buy her a second-hand doll. The speaker ‘would like her life and that of her child / to remain as captured today’, ‘but knows’ that this idealized moment will be their happiest. The camera shutter clicks, ‘shutting them into a future no bigger / than the camera placed before them.’ Poverty is a trap (they are ‘captured’) that dehumanizes and degrades, and in too many cases determines one’s destiny. Not because poor people cannot rise above their circumstances, but because poverty beats down and inflicts such a stigma that it turns daily life into a struggle for survival. This is why so many homeless, exhausted and disillusioned by violence and bureaucratic indifference, succumb to substance abuse or suicide. There is a long road between what the speaker ‘would like’ for her and her child and their lived reality and expectations for the future.
This sense of powerlessness and impulse to abscond from undesirable situations is explored uin numerous other poems, in which the words ‘freedom’ and ‘escape’ feature frequently. And these poems’ short, taut forms (mainly unrhymed couplets and three-line tercets) serve to accentuate a claustrophobic atmosphere of limited space and opportunities—which in turn mimic the cramped living conditions, permeated by the dank permafog of diminished expectations, in which many of the characters find themselves. Take the opening line of ‘Flight’ (which suggests both fleeing one’s current situation and taking a flight): ‘As you escape you think of what lies / ahead – the opportunities, the comfort.’ Note how the poet cleverly breaks up the words ‘lies’ and ‘ahead’ to suggest that escape, in the broad existential sense, is a mirage. De Fréine may have had in mind Irish folks forced to travel abroad in search of economic opportunity—after all, there is nothing more Irish than leaving Ireland—but beyond the heartache and tribulations that follow, ultimately, no matter what may be achieved in the new world, the person who has fled has no control over what happens or is said about them in ‘the place abandoned’. This poignant eight-line piece, a marvel of compression, speaks to a universal urge to pursue freer, more favourable social circumstances.
Of course, in the final analysis, the mere concept of freedom is a chimera. We linger between the newborn’s cries and the death rattle, but there is no escaping Buddha’s ‘old age, sickness and death.’ And in ‘Conversations’ de Fréine references the Anti-D travesty (Fiacha Fola, 2004, and its translation Blood Debts, 2014) in which 1600 Irish women contracted Hepatitis C as a result of the negligence of a Government Department. De Fréine writes that each time similar tragedies come to light, she at least enjoys the right of reply in it.
Newtownards-born de Fréine, who divides her time between Dublin and Connemara, writes in Irish and English and is no stranger to the linguistic and political intricacies, joys and dangers of operating in both tongues. This hasn’t always worked in her favour in Ireland, where the bulk of scribblers tend to fall into one or other camp. In an interview with Lia Mills published in the Irish University Review, she states: ‘Very often when I mention to an English-language writer that I’m writing a book in Irish I see his/her eyes glaze over. Irish language writers seem mystified at times as to why I would bother writing in English.’ Notwithstanding this, the poet continues to work her own sometimes lonely furrow, because for her the case is not one of pick a side or risk being deemed suspect; rather, as a writer raised and schooled in Irish and English, she belongs to and trespasses freely between both major linguistic and literary traditions. (I should clarify here that the English is a translation and the two languages compliment each other.) However, just as a parent often secretly indulges one child over the other, while giving the appearance of cherishing both the same, de Fréine slightly favors Irish. In the same interview, she elaborates on this theme, while also providing valuable insight into her creative process: ‘Very often the idea for a poem comes to me as an image and I jot down the idea and proceed. I’ve also felt that, as Irish is more a language ‘of the people’ it’s better suited to the surreal nature of my poetry and that through it I can more successfully mine the stuff of my imagination.’
Certainly, many of these poems contain elements of surrealism, when the rules of art and the rules of life don’t always square. However, the book is also rooted in and inspired by true, often unjust, events, and the characters in it tend to be working class, then go on to attend schools or gain employment in institutions in which they continue to be stigmatized as a result of that same background. To steal her phrase, de Fréine is very much ‘of the people’ and when she trains her clear, fearless eye on Irish society she begins from the ground up: in the tenement yards and back alleys of (mainly) urban Ireland. This does not make her a political poet, or that flaky, secretly despised creature—the self-anointed ‘voice of the voiceless’; rather, her empathy with and understanding of the lives of materially less fortunate folks derive from her lived experience. In an interview with Shauna Gilligan on her debut book of short stories, Even Still (Arlen House, 2025), de Fréine comments on the aspect of place in her work: ‘Both of the houses were places in which I spent time; both were places of insecurity. The former is a flat in a house in Rathmines during my early years, and from which we could have been evicted at a moment’s notice; the latter is my grandmother’s house in a seaside town in Northern Ireland where I spent my childhood summers, knowing the fun and happiness would end when summer drew to a close…Another place that permeates the stories is the past, L.P. Hartley’s ‘another country’ where, in this case, there were few opportunities for girls and women.’
Indeed, the subjects of these poems are overwhelmingly women or girls—mostly powerless, mute figures who dream of escaping from circumstances or relationships in which they are economically trapped, sexually abused, or have their futures or future prospects determined by authority figures, chauvinism or moral and social opprobrium. Female powerlessness and the impulse to flee oppressive situations are explored in multiple other poems. In ‘The Philanthropist’, a predatory waiter wishes to bed a woman whom he imagines seeks food for herself, only to discover that the food she collects is for homeless children. Likewise, in ‘The Meteorologist’s Woman, the female speaker’s abusive partner (who also feeds her in return for sex), promises her that once she has seen the moon ‘in all its glory’, ‘he will release her’—again highlighting this constant desire to escape. Tiring of the abuse she endures at the meteorologist’s hands, the woman eventually ‘packs her suitcase’ and flees his clutches and broken promises. In ‘The White Board’, a schoolgirl, sexually assaulted by her male guardian and bullied by her classmates
…had been warned time and again
if doubt were cast on her background
or if she hinted at what went on
between them, they would have to move
and if they did she would not be allowed
to attend school in the next town.
Bullied into silence, the girl writes on the board in class: Im afraid the man in the chec shirt is going to kill me. With predictable, rather ominous results: \
Her sentence remained there until
erased by the cleaners while readying
the room for the following term –
by which time there was
neither sight nor sound of the girl.
Note the double use of the word ‘sentence’: the girl’s existence is worse than a jail term.
De Fréine’s universe is confusing and dangerous, but even more so for women and girls. In ‘The Dog’, the speaker, another young girl, knows death for the first time, in the form of the corpse of a dog killed by a car. But it’s merely the first in a series of shocks (the girl loses her grandfather and is tasked with informing her father) and disappointments—again deriving from poverty:
…when the teacher screeches at her that
a mouse has left its mark on her copybook,
when the shopkeeper says she hasn’t enough money
to pay for the loaf of bread, when her mother tells
her there’s no candle left for her to do her homework.
In fact, the female characters in the book appear to be traumatized, hypervigilant, their powers of perception attuned to an inbuilt radar constantly scanning for signs of menace or danger. This is particularly true when it comes to authority figures and institutions. In ‘The Reward’, for example, in which an aura of terror prevails, the characters learn that helping others can prove a precarious endeavour. In this case, the young girl after turning in a lost purse to the police and receiving ‘a ten-shilling note as thank you’, petrified, she discovers her kind action wasn’t enough to compensate ‘…for the terror she felt when handing / the purse to the policeman at the station / her eye level with his holstered gun’. This theme is fleshed out in the ironically titled ‘You’re Not Bothered’, in which the adult speaker weighs the natural impulse to help others in distress against the danger of being used and possibly lured into a life threatening situation. Screams outside the window late at night could be young drunk revellers, but the speaker is also aware that ‘high jinks’ can quickly explode into ‘a full blown flight’—that life can quickly turn violent. As the speaker lies there, unable to sleep, she wonders what she would do ‘…if a girl in her / underwear pounded on your door, screaming / she had been held in a dungeon for years…’, but quickly recalls ‘…the girl who bumped into in / the street and stole your purse, the guy who / threatened you with a knife in the pub / the person who broke into your house and murdered your cat.’
Political or internecine violence, in so much as it impacts upon uninvolved noncombatants, is also explored throughout the book. In ‘The Piano’, inspired by an event during the Irish War of Independence, we see civilians caught up in the hatred and passionate ferocity of war. Art is not much comfort in such a bleak scenario, but as fire engulfed their street, ‘…words from the songs she might have / played rose above them…’ The female speaker in ‘The History Lesson’ is a foreign tourist that a hotel manager, one of the few middle class characters in this book, tries to talk out of visiting the Museum of Revolution. Why rake through all that nonsense / that happened centuries ago? this member of ‘fallen nobility’ asks, but the woman’s aim is to ‘understand the living’ – through analysis of the past. Indeed, his could be said for the majority of the poems, but ‘the living’ here refers to the descendents of those who, when economic pressure and injustice became unbearable, ‘…stormed the mansions / of the rich, plundered their contents / imprisoned their owners, tried them in / mock courts, condemned them to death…’ The poor are always, and preferably, invisible, an afterthought for the ruling classes, except, of course, when they are storming the ramparts. This doesn’t mean that de Fréine is a radical Marxist, but she is most interested in the stories and struggles of ‘ordinary’ people, while remaining keenly aware that one of the greatest lessons of history is that of class struggle.
As with the book’s opening poem, the concluding one, ‘The Town Crier’, ends on a tragic note. De Fréine uses the simplest of words to form short lines that have the capacity to induce instant heartbreak: ‘Ever since her mother disappeared, / the girl watches / from the window, keeping / tabs on who comes and goes.’ Ever since her mother disappeared: this is an astonishing statement, typical of this skilled and versatile poet who possesses the rare knack of packing so much into one line. You never know where she is going to go next. She leaves her readers in a nether state between knowing a certain amount but not quite enough. Why did the girl’s mother disappear? Did she abandon the girl? Was she abducted by some weirdo and strangled? Or was she a victim of ‘political’ violence, like Jean McConville, whose body was secretly buried and later found on a Louth beach in 2003. What we know is that a small girl is in her house struggling to process the loss of her mother—something we can relate to and deeply commiserate with. The world the girl looks out at is cruel, indifferent, silent. She is so desperate for news of ‘what / befell her mother’ that when she sees her adult neighbour return with a newspaper he looks to her ‘…as though the troubles of the world / were stored next to his heart…’ There appears to be no ambiguity in the book’s final line, no cathartic resolution–‘Hear ye! / Hear ye! The world is going from bad to worse’—but although the poems tackle a wide variety of issues that span decades and traverse continents some hope can be found between the lines.
It is difficult to sustain the argument that the recipient of multiple prizes and writing bursaries, including The Patrick Kavanagh Award, over the course of a long and stellar writing career, could be viewed as anything but an unmitigated success. But reading through Celia De Fréine’s oeuvre, which comprises librettos, poetry, plays, screenplays, short stories and translations, in addition to critical essays in Irish and English, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she is deserving of even more, and wider, recognition. I consider her to be one of Ireland’s finest and most versatile writers.
Colin Carberry was born in Toronto and spent his childhood in Lanesboro, Co. Longford, Ireland. He now lives in Mexico with his wife and two daughters. He is the author of the poetry collections The Green Table (2003), Ceasefire in Purgatory (2007) and Ghost Homeland: Selected Poems (2020), and is the translator of Love Poems by Jaime Sabines (Biblioasis, 2011), along with an earlier volume of Sabines’s verse. His poems have appeared in anthologies, journals and newspapers in North America, Europe, and Asia, and have been translated into many languages. He was Writer in Residence at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island in July 2015, and has been awarded Writers’ Bursaries by the Ontario Arts Council. Colin has read from his work on radio and television, and at book fairs, embassies, festivals, prisons, and universities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, Serbia, Slovenia, and the United States.