"There is a great deal of narrative play and wit. The imagery is taken from common life as observed at first hand mostly, but transformed by a delight in resemblance and transformation… there is a Chagallian inclusiveness and generosity in the poems that is more than its incidents. The poetry can turn to darkness and the public world as well as to the intimate village or street."

Louis de Paor was born in Cork in 1961 and and was a key figure in the Irish language literary renaissance of the 1980s and 90s, editing the influential Irish-language journal Innti for a time. He spent time as a lecturer in Irish at University College Cork and Thomond College, Limerick, before combining teaching with radio work in Australia from 1987 to 1996. He was Jefferson Smurfit Distinguished Fellow at the University of St Louis-Missouri in 2002 and received the Charles Fanning medal from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 2009. He was appointed Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at NUI Galway in 2000. His dual-language selection The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale’s Tongue was published in 2014, and his dual language anthology Leabhar na hAthghabhála / Poems of Repossession in 2016. His latest dual-langauge selection is Crooked Love / Grá fiar (Bloodaxe Books / Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2022). He lives in Oughterard, Co. Galway.