Nessa O'Mahony, The Irish Times

There is a moment in the final poem of Mary O'Malley's fine new collection, A Perfect v, when a hawk catches a pover in mid-air. The encounter is sudden a lethal and becomes the perfect metaphor for the act of writing:

Language can be like this.
A fine spray of blood
like a lacquer fan, then nothing.

The hawk's attack is certainly an apt metaphor for O'Malley's writing which throughout is vivid, feral, incisive and brutal in its pursuit of the true image.

The poems in A Perfect V are about victims and survivors. there is a pervasive sense of alienation and homelessness in the first poem, 'Silence', with its assertion that 'there is nowhere to run except the edge'. This sense is sustained through the narratives of lost homes such as 'The Heart' or 'The Miracle of the Cherry tree', where the poet asks 'Where is home now?' in the wake of children leaving the nest, or husbands simply leaving.

But these are not just empty-nester poems; O'Malley seems constantly in the process of recreating or remaking identities. In 'The Shannon Stopover' the plight of the narrator, a hooded detainee en route to Guantanamo Bay, reminds us that we are all implicated in his fate: 'Give me citizenship of this planet - / at least one witness to speak for me'.

Concerns for language, how it is transmuted through history, lie at the heart of this collection. in 'Lynch', based on historical accounts of the hanging og a 15th century mayor of Galway of his own son for murder, the poet notes how the surname may have mutated into the verb used for hanging negroes in the Deep South and comments: 'Language has a diamond core...a word/ can make its way in spite of history to such a crooked truth'.