Reviews

Lani’ O’Hanlon, Landscape of the Body opens with music: in the first section, ‘Routes and Rhythms’ we encounter a family home where a father ‘jigged and deedleee/ deetle didle dummed in the front room’ (Cloud Readers) It’s a fitting beginning for a collection whose poems are as agile and light-footed as the dancers that skip through them. Although O’Hanlon’s poems bring us into spaces of shame and vulnerability, the rhythms of her work remind us that music and dance are sources of companionship and joy. She writes of unhoused friends unable to settle, of refugees from Syria now living in Cappoquin, of the trauma and generational shame of mother-and-baby homes. O’Hanlon is always humane and particular, as in her award-winning poem, ‘When I Visit Dalal.

Rosamund Taylor Poetry Ireland Review

Her poems are complete and compelling; Courageous, political, unflinching. Lani’s lines capture the weight and difficulty associated with living within patriarchal systems. Small tinctures bittersweet as sloes, or concoctions brewed from root and leaf; they have a shamanic quality about them that is unafraid to look into the dark to find the source of our ailments. Grace Wells

Grace Wells Ireland

A viscerally powerful collection that took my breath away.

Sue Leonard The Examiner

Desire and colour partner up in O’Hanlon’s poems, most notably in A Red Negligee in a White Vanity Case whose title brilliantly conjures up the injury in that luxury. In Duende desire pours through sound and objects, ‘the clacking of her heels, hailstones on a tin roof.’ A palm reading becomes a coda for the whole collection ‘a gipsy/takes my hand, reads future,/tracing lines and routes away from/and back again to family.

Martina Evans Bodies, landscapes and desires, The Irish Times

Lani O’Hanlon’s ‘Going to the well’ can be read as a reversal of Heaney’s well-known poem ‘A drink of water (from his collection Field Work. Clear fresh language here avoids polemic, and the poem has a controlled pressure of feeling in it.

Penelope Shuttle Mslexia UK

A poet of grace, memory and theatre, Lani O’Hanlon has emerged as one of the most distinctive and talented poets of the South East. Her poems are cyphers and signs made by a great and important soul at work in the world of Irish poetry.

Thomas McCarthy Ireland

This piece was a beautifully provocative film dealing with heartache and love struggle in a very concise, sensitive and poignant way. The conciseness of the poem is reflected in the considered choice of imagery used, every image and word saying a multitude to create a full picture of the pain and suffering being lived by the protagonists in the story. The juxtaposition of the flimsy negligee and the wholesome dressing gowns represent the two different lives on offer, the tail-wagging dog creating suspense as we wait for the decision that needs to be made. A truly moving piece, this film is a very worthy winner.

Judges Comments UK