Much of Sudden Light, poet Enda Wyley’s 6th collection of poems, takes place in the centre of her native Dublin where the poet lives. Views and glimpses of the immediate city, both as foreground and background, as well as interactions with its inhabitants, comprise the daily exchange of life, and create the sense of a present moment balanced on the city’s various layers of personal and shared history.
Many of the poems of Sudden Light respond to a wide range of paintings, from Janet Mullarney to Luca Signorelli, and photography is also an inspiration, as if memory were a kind of picture-taking or -making – the job of the passing poet to observe, to record, and to move on.
We come in to this – dark shutters
weathered by time, folded back,
the sudden light a gift.
“These are poems rich in magical thinking, often set in “this other/world where I am with her again”. “None of this will come to you again” she notes, candidly, but for the duration of the poems it somehow does.”
—Declan Ryan, The Irish Times“Wyley’s poems are perpetually fresh, utterly scrutinized, marked by vigor and virtuosity, arriving on the page as accomplished things, like settled law, fit for the long-haul language calls us to.”
– Thomas Lynch“From cultural heroes of the recent and ancient past to observations of contemporary life in the city of Dublin, Sudden Light is a collection of vitality and great life, and its ultimate mode and stance is that of hope, as its final credo testifies. Sudden Light is a very accessible, and still a very skilfull, assured and, ultimately, an enjoyable and uplifting read.”
—Derek Coyle, The High Window
SUDDEN LIGHT
after Adam Zagajewski
So much has come my way –
the postman drops the artist’s gift,
an ink sketch upright in my letter box.
What’s there? His own mother’s hands
cradling a green bowl, her face buried
deep inside: tender hunger, her last meal.
Later, the sun’s a found ball our dog chases
across the Iveagh Gardens’ sunken lawn, over
the grassy hump of the disused air-raid shelter
in Merrion Square. And there, the two bronze
lions’ heads burst magic from Rutland Fountain –
water into this day’s conch shell, for too long dry.
Summer will come. Like that one, years ago,
my mother told me all about, her fist of coins
ready to clink into the meter of the dark church
in Rome. Late afternoon, in the middle of her life,
but how the light came on for just a few minutes
and she saw in San Luigi dei Francesi those three
Caravaggios – reminding her of the poet’s words:
They live in semi-darkness and suddenly there’s light.
Sudden Light. Enda Wyley
140 x 216 mm, 71 pp
October 2025
Cover Photo: Mark Granier
