The Light Dancing by Cathy Conlon

Formal and yet sensitive, steeped in memory and precise locale, Cathy Conlon’s poetry is a joy to read and to re-read. Whether she is writing about the Belfast gardener who removed the dead and maimed from bombsite rubble only to plant ‘in the crumbs of clay’ until flowers appeared, or of a classroom encounter with the incoming ‘new Irish’, or feeling for the homeless among the Mills & Boons of a public Library, she creates poem after poem of studious empathy and precision. Chased by a sectarian mob in late-night Belfast, she reveals her lugubrious Southern innocence, yet that innocence is transformed into the maternal fierceness of ‘Newborn’. It is all of these qualities, this story-telling as moral craftwork, that makes Cathy Conlon’s Revival collection so beautiful and so welcome.

– Thomas McCarthy

Cathy Conlon’s poetry displays a formal poise, her soft-spoken poems summon up truths – haunting static moments – ‘the slit pig outside the barn’. Ghosts, too, hover in Conlon’s work – ‘it all assumed a filmic illusion’. We are also invited to share with the poet her abstruseness and soul-warming celebration. In the cadences of her language arrive so many moments of sheer beauty – ‘the last of the light dancing on his wet boots’.

– John Noonan