Alvy's a new poetry collection
‘What Remains the Same’ out this week
‘What Remains the Same’, the new poetry collection by Alvy Carragher, will be launched in Dublin this week.
Alvy (34) grew up in Birdhill and is known to many locally as a cross-country and steeplechase runner with national and Munster titles to her credit. Schooled at St Anne's Community College in Killaloe - and subsequently winning a sport scholarship to Louisiana - she ran with Nenagh Olympic Athletic Club.
Alvy has loved reading for as long as she can remember and credits her mother Jane Bulfin for encouraging her to write herself. Her previous collections include ‘Falling in Love with Broken Things’ (2016) and ‘The men I Keep Under my Bed’ (2021), published by Salmon Poetry, along with a children’s novel, ‘The Cantankerous Molly Darling’ (2019).
Alvy is a recipient of an Arts Council Literary Bursary and she has an MA in Writing from the University of Galway. She has lived in Louisiana, Dublin, South Korea, and Canada. She is currently based in Dublin.
In her latest work, ‘What Remains the Same’, journeys are strivings to escape. Rooms hold ‘the shadow / of an old home, another country’ while, in the book’s title poem, a young woman ‘must swallow pain, remain silent. / This is the shape of her life.’
History hounds the writer’s heels and ancient hurts return as she searches for a voice and for forgiveness. These poems contain a gamut of emotions - from the kindness of a stranger on an aeroplane to ‘Aftermath’ in which a character ‘wanted to hurt him’. In work that tells ‘the whole house deaf / to what it was that went on / in the rooms of its daughters’, ‘What Remains the Same’ is a distressing book. But through the illumination of dark passages in her own and in our country’s woes, Alvy Carragher, in poems touched by something like love, presents a tale of survival and a guiding light. Her latest book will be launched this Thursday, April 18, in Books Upstairs, Dublin, at 6.30pm, along with two other new publications - ‘Cargo’ by Polina Cosgrave and ‘Long Distance’ by John FitzGerald.