Imaginary Menagerie

Ailbhe Darcy was born in Dublin in 1981 and brought up there. She studied for her PhD and MFA at the University of Notre Dame in the US, and taught there and at the University of Münster in Germany. She is now a lecturer in creative writing at Cardiff University. She has published her poetry in Ireland, Britain and the US. Selections of her work are included in the Bloodaxe anthologies Identity Parade and Voice Recognition, and in her pamphlet A Fictional Dress (tall-lighthouse, 2009). Imaginary Menagerie (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), her first book-length collection, was shortlisted for Ireland's dlr Strong Award at Poetry Now / Mountains to Sea. A collaboration with S.J. Fowler, Subcritical Texts, was published by Gorse in 2017. Her second collection, Insistence, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018 and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2018 and the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2019. It won the won the Pigott Poetry Prize 2019 in association with Listowel Writers' Week, Ireland's largest poetry prize. It also won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award, the English language poetry category of the Wales Book of the Year Awards, and went on to be awarded the overall prize, Wales Book of the Year 2019. In February 2020 Ailbhe Darcy presented a half-hour Radio 4 feature on Inger Christensen's book-length poem alphabet, the work which Ailbhe pays homage to in the final sequence of her second collection Insistence.

"Ailbhe Darcy's work has a precision and purpose rare in one so young. Her poems turn up without a word out of place and are not content to just decorate the page with metaphors, but determined to communicate to the reader Darcy's vision of things as they are. Her words are sometimes soothing, sometimes brutal with her truths as she sees them. Never self-absorbed, she is a poet consumed by what the world around her is doing; it is this quality above all others which numbers her among the most promising new Irish poets" - Kevin Higgins. "Here is a new writer for whom it is worth putting a kink in the usual niceties of the space-time continuum - quirkiness without archness, the bellybutton fluff of youth but the empty taxis and left-behind pubs and streets of the left-behind cities afterwards - The talent for splicing the heterogeneous together, cadavre exquis-style" - David Wheatley. "A real find for Irish readers" - Dave Lordan, Arena, RTE Radio.