Wall Street Journal)
Foster is a formidably funny and exciting writer, and it is a joy to watch as he charmingly herds each sacred cow to the slaughter. (
Craig Brown, The Mail on Sunday)
Foster s superb portrait of the essayist Hubert Butler evokes an Irish Orwell; someone who for 60 years, at times reviled and at others ignored, spoke subtle, lucid truth.. Foster eviscerates what he sees as the cramping of the past in memoirs by Frank McCourt and Gerry Adams.. What Foster is really going after is not politics but a way of thinking and writing for an audience in search of reaffirmation rather than dislocation (
Sundial & Hourglass: the emotional architecture of loss over time Chris Agee on his last two collections which record the years after the death of his four-year old daughter, Miriam, in 2001
Fri, Apr 2, 2021, 06:01 Chris Agee
In his Irish Times review of my fourth collection, Blue Sandbar Moon: A micro-epic (2018), the poet John McAuliffe described it, quite correctly, as “an unusual book”.
Indeed, I would go further and say: a highly unusual book. This is, I suppose, flagged up immediately by the contents itself: the 174 untitled first lines of micropoems, preceded by the beautiful but still-used word Proem (suggesting both poetry and prose) for the opening section of six titled poems and one prose parable. Several readers have remarked that reading through these first-lines itself has the feeling of some opaque but evocative poem …