Mock-Orange (Rack Press)
These unsettling, dark lyrics have a wonderful verbal energy; a
mythic imagination. Snowberries have a ‘pale gleam’, a ‘halo’, a texture like
‘a mortician gently filling a bruise.’ Insects and birds come as harbingers, as
though from another world, and are both read as symbols and also dexterous in
their evasion of the speaker’s quest for applied meaning.
Seán Hewitt, Irish Times
Dream Endings, Rack Press - Winner of Michael Marks Award 2012
Dream Endings begins with a glimpse of the poet's dying sister and concludes in
high style with an unusually exuberant funeral. In between, Roisin Tierney
assembles a cast of rare misfits and eccentrics in order to explore the
interconnected themes of illness, madness, incest and death. Her vision is at
all times tender and non-judgmental, and her language remarkable both for the
limpidity of its surface and the depths it allows us to apprehend.
Chair of Judges Alan Jenkins
Five Poems (Clutag Press)
I’ve just lapped up Five Poems in Clutag Press’s beautifully-produced Five Poems Series. …I loved Róisín Tierney’s jazzy five.
Beverley Bie Brahic, Poetry Foundation
… Sacred Heart, is the work of a seasoned storyteller with a rich, descriptive eye and a knack for conjuring the slippages of time. Overlaying past and present, the poem inhabits its couplets with consummate skill, dancing down the page to its striking conclusion.
Sarah Howe, Winchester Poetry Prize
