From Introduction to The Crossing (1998):
“Colin Carberry is a rare combination of things: he is a young poet at once authentically personal, technically adroit, and politically urgent…Like many of the best Irish poets, Carberry is attuned to the politics of memory. In some poems he takes the reader into countryside of the Republic and, in a manner reminiscent of Seamus Heaney, he explores the relationship between landscape and identity. I admire very much the texture of his lines which articulate in an almost physical way the passion he brings to poetry. This first collection of his work accomplishes much and leaves us with the promise of even finer things to come.”
--Dr. Richard Greene, poet, critic, reviewer, author of Graham Greene: A life in Letters
Praise for The Green Table (Toronto launch, Oct. 13, 2003; Irish launch, July 3, 2006, in Lanesboro, Co. Longford):
“As knowledge deepens, so sorrow increases in these poems that move in measured cadence to the goading of old roots; and at the root is man in his shack of bone…attempting to atone for black self-loathing and all the killing that comes out of the grey-dark of the brain: troops in armored cars in Chiapas or troops in armored cars in Belfast…it was déjà vu: race/class warfare live, relieved only by the lover who stands as a furtive exclamation mark in the hour of the hanging question.”
--Barry Callaghan, Exile: The Literary Quarterly & Exile Editions
Praise for my translation of Weekly Diary and Poems in Prose & Adam and Eve, launched July 13, 2004, in Toronto:
“Jaime Sabines was the most important and most influential of Mexico’s modern poets.
Carberry was hooked, determined, (destined?) to translate Sabines, which he has done —capturing all the poet’s complex sensibility — his alert eye, his sensuousness, his mordant humor.”--Barry Callaghan, Exile: The Literary Quarterly & Exile Editions
