“Amazing poetry with not one filler poem, hardly a loose line… What technique, what style… Seek out The Sphere Of Birds and Ciaran Berry and make a place for him, not only on your shelf but in your future.” 

— Liam Murphy, The Munster Express

From ‘the blood that’s bloomed above the wound’s neat hole’ to ‘harsher truths that hit home hour after hour’ Ciaran Berry fixes his unflinching stare on an astounding range of subjects – ‘foundlings’ out of history’s long corridor, Donegal fences, Belfast in the War years, immigrant workers from Ireland, a rogue elephant in Coney Island (1903), a high-wire walker, and the beekeeper’s art. From the fact of blindness to the act of seeing there is a surgical precision to his descriptions and reports. By way of the circuits of his meditations, curiosity and learning lead to the realm of discovery and elucidate often arcane mysteries. Sure-footed and steady paced this first collection reveals an uncommon capacity to sustain tension over long lines and, even, extended poems. The Sphere of Birds is a remarkably impressive, eclectic and accomplished debut.

“Bringing a rangy, springy connectedness to the world of genuine sensory experience — no "conceit" poems on some borrowed trope of history or science here, though history and science work through the weave — Berry draws together intellection, emotion and the sensory so that every apprehension seems necessary.”

— Fiona Sampson, The Irish Times