Foreign News

The award to Aifric Mac Aodha of the 2017 Oireachtas Prize for Poetry confirmed her position in the vanguard of younger Irish women poets. From a stony-faced DJ with ‘a canny eye’ to a Greek nymph renowned for her chastity, Foreign News, poems in Irish with translations into English by David Wheatley is a book whose reach and aims are evident in its richly allusive sequences.

In matching her sense of play and her use of idiom David Wheatley proves himself a perfect counterpart for Aifric Mac Aodha’s poems that resound with longing and a modern sensibility.