“I, bird is an extraordinary collection of poems that explores the interior landscapes of the mind, the thresholds that confine us, and the imaginative spaces that shift and shape perspectives in ways that allow us to notice ‘the glow of lights from small places.’ Language is made strange in I, bird – Ní Neachtain never goes the expectant route, enticing the reader instead to stay alert, to stay awake to its possibilities, its twist and turns, where one word is ‘the colour of desire’ and another ‘the shimmer-green of long grasses.’ These remarkable poems speak of grief, myth, the body, and of ‘tarnished metaphor’, and Ní Neachtain is brilliantly attuned to pattern, weaving these themes throughout the collection to give the book a sense of enthralling cohesion that will make you want to read it all at once before returning to the beginning, to start again.”
Leeanne Quinn, (b. in Drogheda in 1978, and grew up there and in Monasterboice, Co. Louth. She studied at University College Dublin, University College Cork, and holds a PhD in American Literature from Trinity College Dublin. Her first collection of poetry, Before You, was published by Dedalus Press in 2012 and highly commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2013. Her second collection, Some Lives, was published in 2020 and noted as a ‘Book of the Year’ by The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. She is the recipient of three Arts Council Bursary awards, most recently in 2021. Her poems have been widely anthologised, appearing in Queering The Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Lifeboat Press, 2021), Hold Open the Door (UCD Press, 2020), Windharp: Poems of Ireland Since 1916 (Penguin, 2015), and The Forward Book of Poetry 2013 (Faber, 2012). With Joseph Woods, she co-edited Romance Options, an anthology of contemporary love poems from Ireland (Dedalus Press, 2022))
“In this intimate, philosophical collection, Róisín Ní Neachtain confronts the horror of having a mind and a body, interrogating what to do with each in a world of cruel and unjust inequalities. Can a mind transcend the limitations socially imposed upon a body? Can language? What can a person do when cleanliness belies harm? For all her questioning, Ní Neachtain also offers us answers. “You look around the room again and decide that you can make it dirty too.” I, bird is probing, existential, and visceral.”
Gustav Parker Hibbett, author of ‘High Jump as Icarus Story’ (Banshee Press), winner of the 2025 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. (Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout. Their first poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press), was shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize. They are the 2025 Commissioned Writer for Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, and they were a 2024 Djanikian Scholars Finalist and a 2023 Obsidian Foundation Fellow. Their work has appeared in LitHub, Adroit, London Magazine, Guernica, fourteen poems, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, and elsewhere. They hold a BA in English from Stanford University, and they are currently pursuing a PhD in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin, where they are an Early Career Research Fellow at the Long Room Hub.)
“These are extraordinary poems by a necessary new voice: simultaneously surreal, poised, playful, harrowing. At once walled in and pushing against their structures, these poems erode and are re-sculpted through this impressive collection, taking flight as they find new forms. Quite simply, ‘Listen to these fragments’”
Francesca Bratton, author of ‘Stronger than Death, Hart Crane’s Last Year in Mexico’. ( Francesca Bratton is a writer, critic, poet and researcher at the Department of English at the University of Maynooth. Her academic monograph, Visionary Company: Hart Crane and Modernist Magazines was published by Edinburgh University Press (June 2021). She has previously taught at Durham University, where she studied for a doctorate on Hart Crane, and she is a graduate of St John’s College, Oxford and UCL. Francesca has lived in Paris, worked as a bookseller and as a librarian. In 2022 she was awarded the Irish Arts Council Next Generation Award in Literature.)
“Amidst the climate disaster, in I, bird Róisín dares us to find solace in roots, trees, and birds, to find communion in and with wilderness, pouring ‘the water of vowels’ into our mouths, fulfilling her poetic interest in ‘what has been carved out’. I, bird embodies and defies nature: Róisín’s poems are precise like a score with surrendering moments of delight and revelation. I, bird is a performance and an invitation to look beyond the human because ‘there is life outside’”
Rafael Mendes, author of ‘The Migrant Dictionary’. (Rafael Mendes is a Brazilian-Irish migrant whose work has recently appeared or has work forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Propel Magazine, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He was featured in Poetry Ireland's Introduction Series in 2023 and was awarded the 2023 Irish Writer's Centre/Tyrone Guthrie Centre Lacuna Bursary. He is a PhD candidate in Latin American Studies at Trinity College Dublin.)
“Like a contemporary, clear-eyed, Irish Baudelaire, Róisín Ní Neachtain’s "I, bird" wages a war on wholeness. The prose poems and wounded lyrics of this collection “[spit] venom”, uncovering for us the abject in the lush. With a lyricism that is cool, caustic, and elliptical – “the grief of a sea noise” – Ní Neachtain’s poetry wrenches human dignity from a barbarous world”
Clíodhna Bhreatnach, author of ‘Pink Roses, Green’ (Green Bottle Press), highly commended for the Patrick Kavanagh Award. (Clíodhna Bhreatnach is from Waterford and lives in Dublin. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and The Forward Book of Poetry 2023. She has recently been awarded a Dublin City Council Arts Bursary for 2025. She is the former poetry editor of Frustrated Writers Group).
“The poems move from the interior to the outside world, deftly and with precision. From “The floor feels soft. The floor is not comforting” to “Out of her mouth flew a small bird”. These are tender, lyrical poems. Ní Neachtain has a unique way of seeing the world – a mesmerising way of showing it to us. A gifted and welcome voice.”
Martina Dalton (Martina lives in Tramore, County Waterford. Her poems have been published widely including Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, The Stinging Fly, Crannóg, Skylight 47, Channel, The Honest Ulsterman, The Waxed Lemon, The Cormorant, The Stony Thursday Book, Washing Windows Too (Arlen House), Local Wonders, and Romance Options (both from Dedalus Press). In 2019 she was selected for the Words Ireland National Mentoring Programme. In 2021 She was shortlisted for the Julian Lennon Prize for Poetry, won third prize in the Red Line Festival Poetry Competition, and second prize in the Waterford Poetry Prize)
“Róisín Ní Neachtain’s practice as a visual artist infuses her poetry with colour, light, and synaesthetic imagery. In a combination of prose and free-form poems, I, bird destabilises reality, conjuring aspects of David Lynch and Marina Abramović. This is a collection for our times – ‘genocide is being perpetrated in a foreign land ... Now is the time for the ‘Screaming Tree’ (‘The White Room’)”
Amanda Bell, author of ‘Riptide’ (Doire Press). (Amanda is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre and holds a Masters in Poetry Studies. Her haibun collection Undercurrents (Alba Publishing, 2016) was awarded second prize in the Haiku Society of America’s Kanterman Merit Book Award and shortlisted for a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award by the Haiku Foundation. Her children’s book The Lost Library Book was published by The Onslaught Press in May 2017. She was selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series in 2016 and twice highly commended for the Patrick Kavanagh Award. In 2015 she won the William Allingham Poetry Prize and she is the editor of Maurice Craig: Photographs (Lilliput, 2011) and The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work: An Anthology of Poetry by the Hibernian Writers (Alba Publishing, 2015))
