In these playful, considered poems, the emotional impacts of small moments are captured in a relaxed and natural way. Verbal gymnastics and powerful metaphors are laid down in spare, lively words. This confident first collection from a writer who has worked primarily in the world of sound combines accessible language with lyricism and an ear tuned to nature.
I have always admired people with ideas and flair and imagination. Eithne Hand has it all. This first book of her poetry is a fresh new voice and for me paints so many wonderful pictures.
Kathleen Watkins
Fox Trousers sparkles with an inimitable mix of wit and wisdom. Eithne Hand’s poems of close observation surprise and delight, moving from playfulness to tenderness and from the mundane to the mysterious in the space of a breath. In the music of her lines, as in our lives, joy and grief live side by side.
Jane Clarke
Eithne Hand is wary of the ‘love of mirrored self’. Instead her poems look outward, generously and wittily to the loving father of a focus-puller, to a man clutching his double bass and other men clutching their penises, to a pencil’s humility, Saint-Saens’ insides, a ‘magnificent’ woman scrubbing by hand, to what an atlas, a coastal rock, or a lemon waiting to be squeezed might like us to know; a mare with her foal reminds us of loss, a playground swing of acceptance and a dog teaches us joy. Which, more than anything, is what this collection is – a joy.
Gerard Stembridge
