"John McAuliffe's Selected Poems are a map of the places where the imagination meets observation, readers invited to travel further into questions of love and attachment than they ever would alone. Clear voiced and lyrical, McAuliffe's poems have weight without heaviness, and shade with-out darkness." --Nicholas Allen, author of Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled " [McAuliffe] displays an ability to write public poems about Ireland using tones filled with keen wit, and using cadences, forms, and rhythms that have a time-less beauty and grace." --Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician "For all the amiable good humour of the voice of these poems, they never stray far from the things that really matter in a modern life. The domain of the imagined is always at the service of the world we know, to cast light on it." --Bernard O'Donoghue, The Irish Times "McAuliffe's complicated, quizzical, lucid relationship with domesticity situates his speakers in simultaneous comfort and discomfort; these are poems that mine the quotidian and rise, wittily and without an ounce of pretension, to the symbolic." --Daisy Fried, author of The Year the City Emptied "McAuliffe's gift is to be mindful of elsewheres. He swerves to effect: his shrewd sideways and backwards glances count, pouring light on a subject from several directions simultaneously.

Any given moment is likely to be underpinned by what went on before or what is to come. He knows the power of parallel universes." --Kate Kellaway, The Observer.