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Enda Wyley has published six collections of poetry, from her debut Eating Baby Jesus (1993) to her most recent Sudden Light, Dedalus Press, (2025). She has also published Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems, Dedalus Press ( 2014 ). She is the recent recipient of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy 2026 Prize in Poetry, St Thomas University Minnesota, U.S.A, now in its 30th year. Other awards include the Vincent Buckley Prize in Poetry, Melbourne University and a Reading Association of Ireland Award. Enda lives in Dublin where she teaches poetry and co-hosts the popular podcast Books for Breakfast. She is a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of artists.
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Sudden Light by Enda Wyley. £11/€12. Dedalus Press. ISBN: 978-1-915629-45-6.
Reviewed by Derek Coyle
Caravaggio’s great painting ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’ (1599 – 1600) might provide the abiding image for Dublin poet Enda Wyley’s latest collection from Dedalus Press. It is that shaft of light that comes down into the room, so natural, and yet so freighted with sacred significance. Which is to say that Wyley brings much light to dark corners, so confidently, so assuredly, in this collection.
The loss of her mother, we discover, lies at the heart of the collection’s title poem. And, as the collection’s opener, this poem is a shaft of light which illuminates much of what lies ahead. The loss of the poet’s mother will be explored in a series of touching poems across the collection. Such loss is framed within an appreciation of the everyday and the ordinary. In ‘Sudden Light’ the poet receives a gift from an artist in the post – an image of the artist’s mother’s hands holding a green bowl, enjoying her final meal. As the poem unfolds, we see the poet’s dog chasing sunlight across the Iveagh Gardens and stumbling upon a disused air-raid shelter in Merrion Square. The magic of water pouring unexpectedly from a fountain brings satisfaction when one has been ‘too long dry.’ The poem then appears to leap out into a memory of her mother in the church of San Luigi Dei Francesi in Rome where she had viewed three Caravaggios. I have viewed them myself. You drop coins into a slot, and the side altar is illuminated for a few minutes such that you can view the paintings. Of course, many have been here before, including the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, and Wyley finishes with his line: ‘they live in semi-darkness and suddenly there’s light.’ As I have mentioned, the surprise arrival of light might be the abiding metaphor of the collection. Like the almost non-sequitur lines that bounce you along and into this opening poem; from its first line, ‘so much has come my way’ – with its tone of grateful appreciation; to the image of the artist’s mother satisfying her hunger at the green bowl; to the sun’s ball chased by the dog, to how ‘the two bronze/lions’ heads burst magic from Rutland Fountain’, ‘water into this day’s conch shell’; culminating in the image of her mother viewing the Caravaggios in Italy. Ultimately, the images are distinctive, unexpected, and yet linked; no bad poetic strategy in one of the collection’s most formally adventuress of pieces. We can be thankful for any light received in this world – and Wyley supplies plenty of it in this collection of poems of great formal confidence, memorable lines, and such delicate touches, such graceful flourishes.
In ‘Charging’, Wyley takes her poetic conceit from the most unlikely of contemporary corners, the charging of a phone. The word ‘charging’ is loaded with possibilities; being filled with power, restoring something, reviving the faded or jaded. Through this poetic means Wyley presents an image of Irish writer Dermot Bolger, on some video clip, relaying his memories of the poet Michael Hartnett, as well as conveying a number of his poems. It is a novel conceit and a convincing one. Hartnett is suddenly before us, his life and his loves, and just in time as ‘my phone dies. The day charges.’ It is morning time and the world will need its charge of daylight, just as the phone needs electricity. In this way is the technological naturalized and made poetic, no mean feat.
There aren’t enough poems about the experience of people in the GAA, either as spectators or participants, and yet Wyley finds her way into giving us a finely poised portrait of hurling star Henry Shefflin through his recently commissioned portrait in the National Gallery. Her description of the painting does more than just give us a visual image of the picture; it conveys something of his stance towards life, a quiet confidence, an understated determination, a groundedness, that is surely an invitation to us all: ‘And who would not want to be/Henry Shefflin.’ She makes the much-admired athlete an approachable and homely, a recognisable figure, even if he is ‘the suited monarch/of all about him.’ She locates Shefflin in the context of the Gallery, connecting his portrait to that of Canova’s ‘Amorino’, which is caught in Shefflin’s line of vision from where he hangs, that is, if he were a creature of flesh and blood. Amorino and Shefflin both share a type of regal stature her comparison suggests. One grips a bow, the other the handle of his hurley. Implicit in the comparison is the battle metaphor; both have fought bravely and steadfastly; both are sterling representatives of their respective territories and communities. Reading this poem led me to hope that we might see more poems about hurlers and hurling.
In the midst of life there is much to celebrate, and there is nothing more primordial and ancient than honouring friendship with a meal. In ‘Lunch Blessing’ the food is Italian, as are the friends. Within earshot of the bells of Sant’Angelo, aubergines, olives, mozzarella, are enjoyed with spaghetti and bread. In the course of the poem, we encounter two lizards, a Siamese cat, and three white butterflies. The only relief from ‘the scorching stones’ is breadcrumbs as they ‘fall like summer snow/on our check tablecloth.’ Wyley is a celebrant of abundance in whatever form it takes. And when in Rome there is a profusion of art, architecture, and sculpture. ‘Daphne Becomes a Tree’ contemplates Bernini’s ‘Apollo and Daphne’, an iconic work of baroque sculpture in the Galleria Borghese. In a poem of three fine quintains, Wyley conveys the intense desire of Daphne to escape the clutches of Apollo by turning into a laurel tree – as the legend relates – but she conveys a perspective all her own in imagining Daphne wishing to leap out of the window of the gallery into,
the garden’s lemon trees below,
the city hers to go where she likes,
to do in it whatever she wants…
There are several poems in the collection that deal with a painful fall and its aftermath, an unfortunate injury that the poet suffered. ‘Empathy’ is one of these poems, and very imaginative and creative it is too. The poem rolls from its title into a series of well sculpted tercets. The poet makes this emotional quality as tangible as a garden we can enter, with a desire to leave the house and access nature, easily and unpained, such that we can encounter and know its ‘green stillness.’ We can feel the ‘morning dew’, ‘plants’, and the firmness of ‘a fallen//pear in your palm.’ Thus, the poet leads us into quietude and benevolence through her confident poetic ventriloquism, and by a delicate sleight of the poetic hand, has demonstrated our, and her own, capacity for empathy. There is a witty subtlety and a calm confidence to this poetic conceit which is intrinsic to its charm.
In the latter part of the collection, we encounter a touching and tender sequence ‘Photos of My Mother’. We see the poet’s mother at ten, dressed up as heavenly Mary for the nun’s re-enactment of the Assumption. After her artistic triumph ‘I cut my hair short./Got myself a pair of scissors/and chopped away.’ The reason why: ‘I wanted/to be young, wanted to be modern.’ And so, something of the mother’s independence of spirit is marked and celebrated here. And the sense is conveyed that Wyley was born into a generation that was going to see old certainties fade as Ireland entered an exciting, if uncharted, period of change and transition. Wyley’s parents are celebrated across the sequence; the wily Wyley senior ‘borrowing’ her sister’s best outfit for her first date with the poet’s father; her mother leaving the family home in Cork for a new life in Palmerstown Road, Dublin, sees her father ask reasonably, ‘why would anyone/leave Cork for Dublin? I mean to say, haven’t we/everything we need here, girl?’ Once in Palmerstown Road, Wyley senior sets about making herself at home, ripping up an old carpet to get at wooden floors beneath that will be magnificent once polished, much to the landlord’s ire. In this way, Wyley marks and celebrates her mother’s stubborn independence of spirit. In this sequence Wyley captures generational change, and a tender and touching family portrait it is, with her mother, quite rightly, at the centre.
‘Light’ is appropriately named, as it is a type of visionary poem, a poem of pure imagining. Wyley junior images herself back into the world of her mother in the early years of her marriage, at the time when the children were young. The abstract experience of time disappeared is made tangible through concrete objects – the 70s carpet, the brown couch, the hall table, the heavy black phone, the wooden banister slide. By this means we are brought back into the world of the disappeared, the world of memory, as
I go back there now, take her hands
in mine, am a ghost come from my
future, back to her past.
The poem concludes with a beautiful image of mother and daughter lying back in a moment of peace ‘on her big bed’:
The light that falls on us both now,
our fingers touching in this other
world where I am with her again.
Wyley concludes the collection with the resonant ‘Visiting’, the narrative of which sees her entering a room after a journey in hot weather, ‘our flushed faces’, ‘our hands clammy’. Entering this new room, they feel as if it ‘gathers us into the still/relief of its afternoon.’ Her eye is drawn to ‘the shadows/brushed finely on the wall – //a secret world.’ And so, imaginatively, through the power of words, her poetry, she brings us into this other space,
the hush of this waiting space,
room within room, its mystery a veil
drawn aside, revealing what was always
there – a voice unheard, a door left ajar,
waiting for us to step inside, arrive.
And so, Enda Wyley ends Sudden Light with great confidence. We leave as we entered, through the light of the imagination. There is a quiet assurance about this poem, a skilful understatement, which stands as a testament to Enda Wyley’s belief in the power of poetry to take us to magical spaces, primordial places, the powerful nooks and crannies of the human heart and mind. In this collection we encounter the trauma of injury and loss, as well as celebrating the world’s abundance, in food and culture and travel. From cultural heroes of the recent and ancient past to observations of contemporary life in the city of Dublin, Sudden Light is a collection of vitality and great life, and its ultimate mode and stance is that of hope, as its final credo testifies. Sudden Light is a very accessible, and still a very skilful, assured and, ultimately, an enjoyable and uplifting read.
Derek Coyle published Reading John Ashbery in Costa Coffee Carlow in 2019. It was shortlisted for the Shine Strong 2020 poetry award for best first collection. Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster is due in 2023. He has published poems in The Irish Times, Irish Pages, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Salzburg Review, and The Texas Literary Review. He lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s in Ireland.
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PHOTO IN A PARK
What I think of now is not the photograph
but who took it. Who stood there with their back
to the fountain and kindly captured us, a young couple,
their six-week-old baby, a rug laid out on the grass?
Who was it that stopped casually on the gravel, saved us
like this in time? There’d been no sleep. I’d run through
the night like an innocent new athlete. To persist, endure,
to nurse in the depths of dark, the rest of the house asleep.
And yet, exhaustion was defeated by joy. Our little girl
all moon-eyed curiosity at everything that rustled, moved.
We sat on that rug so naturally, at ease together, my legs
folded sideways, you with the paper open in the sunshine.
Zoom in now and check the date. It is June, many years ago.
We are brave first-time parents marking a patch for ourselves
in the summer park – and that stranger, man who catches us here,
what does he do? Leaves us to what will come our way. Moves on.
SUDDEN LIGHT
after Adam Zagajewski
So much has come my way –
the postman drops the artist’s gift,
an ink sketch upright in my letter box.
What’s there? His own mother’s hands
cradling a green bowl, her face buried
deep inside: tender hunger, her last meal.
Later, the sun’s a found ball our dog chases
across the Iveagh Garden’s sunken lawn, over
the grassy hump of the disused air-raid shelter
in Merrion Square. And there, the two bronze
lions’ heads burst magic from Rutland Fountain –
water into this day’s conch shell, for too long dry.
Summer will come. Like that one, years ago,
my mother told me all about, her fist of coins
ready to clink into the meter of the dark church
in Rome. Late afternoon, in the middle of her life,
but how the light came on for just a few minutes
and she saw in San Luigi dei Francesi those three
Caravaggios – reminding her of the poet’s words:
They live in semi-darkness and suddenly there’s light.
CHARGING
for Dermot Bolger
& in memory of Michael Hartnett
Before the light goes out
on this phone, before
the scramble for a plug
and the battery charges,
before the blind is rolled up
and the light angles
its way into my room –
before all this,
for these fading minutes
let me listen and watch.
In the clip you’re sitting
in your tweed suit
complete with waistcoat
to honour your friend,
his poems in hand,
remembering
a morning he called
from a phone box
on Leeson Street.
He presses button A.
A joke. A new poem
before the line dies,
his money spent.
Oh, Angela Liston,
oh, father that he kissed
for the last and first time,
oh, woman that he loved
from the moment she died.
I hear it all now. The past opens
its pages, unearths him, stick cut
from a tree in Coole Park guiding
him home to Dartmouth Square.
My phone dies. The day charges.
The High Window 