'Anne Donnellan’s poems give us quirky and irresistible glimpses of people who are largely written out of contemporary Irish poetry’s official version of itself. Donnellan does for the people (past and present) of the townlands of her native County Clare a later-day version of what Kavanagh did for his Monaghan. Her poems are rich with guttural wit. Many of Donnellan’s poems tell us stories of the sort of people we might call ‘characters’. But they also do us the major service of rescuing the language from the banalities inflicted on it by people who aspire to be Junior Ministers, or known associates of Bono, or, in the more severe cases, spokeswomen for the Small Firms’ Association.”— Kevin Higgins, author of several publications, including most recent, Ecstatic, 2022.
