Sudden Light

Much of Sudden Light, Irish poet Enda Wyley's 6th collection of poems, takes place in the centre of her native Dublin where the poet lives. Views and glimpses of the immediate city, both as foreground and background, as well as interactions with its inhabitants, comprise the daily exchange of life, and create the sense of a present moment balanced on the city's various layers of personal and shared history.

Many of the poems respond to a wide range of paintings, from Janet Mullarney to Luca Signorelli, and photography is also an inspiration, as if memory were a kind of picture-taking or -making - the job of the passing poet to observe, to record, and to move on.

We come in to this - dark shutters

weathered by time, folded back,

the sudden light a gift.

"Enda Wyley is a true poet." - Fiona Sampson, The Irish Times

"Wyley's poems are perpetually fresh, utterly scrutinised, marked by vigour and virtuosity, arriving on the page as accomplished things, like settled law, fit for the long haul language calls us to." - Thomas Lynch