Critical comments on Macdara Woods's work

Paul Durcan:
The publication of Stopping the Lights in Ranelagh is an event of the first importance, drawing our attention to an outstanding poet whose talent, perseverance and courage have always been the envy of his followers and admirers.

Fortnight (Belfast):
One of the most individual voices in Irish poetry, if not an easy one. He writes like no one living.

Thomas McCarthy, Poetry Ireland Review:
He teases out the myths that bind families, he interrogates childhood and faces disappointment. The whole poem boils down to one marvellous metaphor.

James Liddy in Poetry Ireland Review wrote of the Selected Poems:
This poetry has run counter to the grain. It is lush, surreal, linguistically rhetorical. This is not a domesticated poetry, the kitchen doesn't unravel its somnolent marvels here nor do family memories overcrowd the page ...The sixties section retains the charm of that decade of elaborate chimeras, the post-World War II global aesthetics, and poems like 'To be Pinned on the Cathedral Door' and 'Cauchemar is a White Horse' retain original heat.

Books Ireland called Woods 'one of the most original poetic voices of Ireland over a third of a century'; the Irish Times found 'a poet whose vision had crystallised and matured with a sureness of style, form and tone of voice... public issues were mediated through a more personal and even domestic prism of light.'

Reviewing his two latest collections, Bernard O'Donoghue wrote in The Irish Times (7 April 2001):

MACDARA WOODS has been an absorbing and relatively unplaceable presence in Irish writing since the 1970s, because the internationalising tendency of his poems to push the boundaries of Irish poetry outwards was always balanced by a rooted use of Irish language and tradition.
These two new books offer variations on this balance: Knowledge in the Blood adds nearly fifty pages of new poems to those available to the 1996 Selected, and is accompanied by the powerful new sequence, The Nightingale Water, which centres on the harrowing events surrounding the poet's mother's strokes and death.
One of Woods's most striking capacities has been to write the long poem, a form traditionally thought impossible in the modern age of confessional lyric. Reading these books together now, the most substantial earlier long poems, such as 'Above Pesaro, June 1993', read like an apprenticeship that has reached mastery in The Nightingale Water.

[...] Woods's poems have always been absorbing in their twists and turns. But this steadily pursued sequence seems much his strongest achievement to date.