From brief lyrics that examine a mixtape or a plectrum to larger meditations on the connections between the life of Robert Frost and a trip to the supermarket in the snow, the poems in Ciaran Berry’s Liner Notes consider questions of what it means to grow up somewhere and grow away from somewhere. His voice is by turns celebratory, elegiac, inquisitive and quietly humorous, as he conjures a past that’s ‘bric-à-brac and hand-me-down’.
As these poems trace their way backwards towards a ‘phone box lit up at the corner / like a spaceship that will never take off’, we meet along the road everyone from Elvis to Dolly Parton and Dolly the Sheep.
In his hands, time and place shift shape and take on new form as, like the couple driving through upstate New York in one of the collection’s later poems, we find ourselves entering the town of Ovid.
“His ability to move mercurially between simplicity and complexity, between a soufflé-light surface and deeper levels redolent of the rich complexity of a figgy pudding, makes his verse amenable as well as substantial.”
— Dick Edelstein, Dublin Review of Books
“Berry has a talent for revealing a striking concentration of emotion in a single line or image, and it is here that his power as a writer lies.”
— Seán Hewitt, Poetry Ireland Review