Praise for Ceasefire in Purgatory
“History is the nightmare from which I am
struggling to awake,” James Joyce wrote,
and the years since he died have been even
more nightmarish, especially in his native
Ireland. In later generation Colin Carberry
wrestles with similar demons, not only at
home in Ireland but in the wide world. His
poetry with its dark and bright imagery
expresses a vision of that struggle in a
distinctive voice, Irish in its eloquent music,
yet with echoes of Canada, Mexico, and
Rastafari Babylon. The settings may be
purgatorial yet they’re redeemed by the
energy and order of the verse. The imaginative
force is heightened by its containment within metrical verse, including sonnets and terza rima. Redemption, the longed-for ceasefire, is achieved by hope and love. These poems are profound and moving, the real thing, poetry such as we seldom find, both lucid and mysterious.
Kildare Dobbs"Colin Carberry is widely and rightly regarded as one of Canada’s finest poets."
Richard Greene"What I like most in Colin Carberry's poetry, and what most impresses me, is the quest, the constant seeking to capture the world in a phrase, the old world in the New, the new world in the Old."
Jack Harte"Elegant and well-wrought''
Bernard MacLaverty"Carberry's work is a freshening, an inspiration, a model of the new and the deeply traditional at once."
A.F. Moritz
