"... poems of Brechtian bite... of editorial impulse... and of more durable, stripped-down mystery... Because Bardwell's allusions and imagery insistently site her poems in discomfiting Irish realities, the more confessional of her poems properly end and begin in the mode of Blake... Recalling the startling outsider verse of Bardwell's contemporary, Patrick Galvin, such lines remind us that Bardwell remains an outsider at home in Yeats's Sligo - unnaturalised in EU Ireland."
Thomas Dillon Redshaw, The Irish Times
"... beautiful direct descriptions of the varied landscape of her home place..."
Sligo Champion
"Honest and sparkling, Leland Bardwell's poetry comes alive on the page with an enviable lightness of touch, and in the same stroke delivers a punch..."
Writing Notes from the Sligo Arts Office
"She is the doyenne of women poets writing in English. Her work has humour and wit... It has the immediacy of personal conversation, yet is crafted with care for form. She makes something extraordinary of 'ordinary' experience"
Irish Press
"Leland Bardwell's poetry is witty, full of sharp, intimate honesty, full of truth and surprises. She is a poet who has felt the shocks of our time, the private impacts and the historic changes"
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Leland Bardwell was born in India, grew up in Leixlip, Co Kildare and was educated in Dublin and London. As a fiction writer she has published five novels, the most recent being Mother to a Stranger (2002), as well as a volume of short stories, Different Kinds of Love (1986); as a playwright she has had work produced by RTÉ and the BBC, and her stage credits include No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (1984) and Jocasta (2001). Since her first collection of poems The Mad Cyclist appeared in 1970, she has published three further collections, The Fly and the Bedbug (1984), Dostoevsky's Grave (1993) and The White Beach (1998). A co-editor of the long-running literary magazine Cyphers, Leland Bardwell is a member of Aosdána and lives in Co. Sligo. In 2006 the Dedalus Press published her latest collection of poems, The Noise of Masonry Settling.
Thomas Dillon Redshaw, The Irish Times
"... beautiful direct descriptions of the varied landscape of her home place..."
Sligo Champion
"Honest and sparkling, Leland Bardwell's poetry comes alive on the page with an enviable lightness of touch, and in the same stroke delivers a punch..."
Writing Notes from the Sligo Arts Office
"She is the doyenne of women poets writing in English. Her work has humour and wit... It has the immediacy of personal conversation, yet is crafted with care for form. She makes something extraordinary of 'ordinary' experience"
Irish Press
"Leland Bardwell's poetry is witty, full of sharp, intimate honesty, full of truth and surprises. She is a poet who has felt the shocks of our time, the private impacts and the historic changes"
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Leland Bardwell was born in India, grew up in Leixlip, Co Kildare and was educated in Dublin and London. As a fiction writer she has published five novels, the most recent being Mother to a Stranger (2002), as well as a volume of short stories, Different Kinds of Love (1986); as a playwright she has had work produced by RTÉ and the BBC, and her stage credits include No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (1984) and Jocasta (2001). Since her first collection of poems The Mad Cyclist appeared in 1970, she has published three further collections, The Fly and the Bedbug (1984), Dostoevsky's Grave (1993) and The White Beach (1998). A co-editor of the long-running literary magazine Cyphers, Leland Bardwell is a member of Aosdána and lives in Co. Sligo. In 2006 the Dedalus Press published her latest collection of poems, The Noise of Masonry Settling.