Róisín Ní Neachtain's I, bird is a fragmented, lyrical reckoning with grief, trauma, and the porous boundary between body and voice. Structured in poetic prose and verse, the collection moves between clinical spaces, mythic reimaginings, and surreal transformation, often adopting the perspective of a woman becoming bird, ghost, or sound. With tonal shifts from the intimate to the political, it interrogates violence-both systemic and personal-while also attending to beauty, memory, and resistance. The language is exacting and hallucinatory, shaping a poetics of survival that refuses silence.
 
PRAISE for I, Bird:
I, bird is an extraordinary collection of poems that explores the interior landscapes of the mind, the thresholds that confine us, and the imaginative spaces that shift and shape perspectives in ways that allow us to notice ‘the glow of lights from small places.’ Language is made strange in I, bird – Ní Neachtain never goes the expectant route, enticing the reader instead to stay alert, to stay awake to its possibilities, its twist and turns, where one word is ‘the colour of desire’ and another ‘the shimmer-green of long grasses.’ These remarkable poems speak of grief, myth, the body, and of ‘tarnished metaphor’, and Ní Neachtain is brilliantly attuned to pattern, weaving these themes throughout the collection to give the book a sense of enthralling cohesion that will make you want to read it all at once before returning to the beginning, to start again.
   — Leeanne Quinn
 
In this intimate, philosophical collection, Róisín Ní Neachtain confronts the horror of having a mind and a body, interrogating what to do with each in a world of cruel and unjust inequalities. Can a mind transcend the limitations socially imposed upon a body? Can language? What can a person do when cleanliness belies harm? For all her questioning, Ní Neachtain also offers us answers. ‘You look around the room again and decide that you can make it dirty too.’ I, bird is probing, existential, and visceral.
   — Gustav Parker Hibbett
 
These are extraordinary poems by a necessary new voice: simultaneously surreal, poised, playful, harrowing. At once walled in and pushing against their structures, these poems erode and are re-sculpted through this impressive collection, taking flight as they find new forms. Quite simply, ‘Listen to these fragments.’
   — Francesca Bratton
 
Amidst the climate disaster, in I, bird Róisín dares us to find solace in roots, trees, and birds, to find communion in and with wilderness, pouring ‘the water of vowels’ into our mouths, fulfilling her poetic interest in ‘what has been carved out’. I, bird embodies and defies nature: Róisín’s poems are precise like a score with surrendering moments of delight and revelation. I, bird is a performance and an invitation to look beyond the human because ‘there is life outside’. 
   — Rafael Mendes
 
Like a contemporary, clear-eyed, Irish Baudelaire, Róisín Ní Neachtain’s I, bird wages a war on wholeness. The prose poems and wounded lyrics of this collection ‘[spit] venom’, uncovering for us the abject in the lush. With a lyricism that is cool, caustic, and elliptical – ‘the grief of a sea noise’ – Ní Neachtain’s poetry wrenches human dignity from a barbarous world.
   — Clíodhna Bhreatnach
 
The poems move from the interior to the outside world, deftly and with precision. From ‘The floor feels soft. The floor is not comforting’ to ‘Out of her mouth flew a small bird’. These are tender, lyrical poems. Ní Neachtain has a unique way of seeing the world – a mesmerising way of showing it to us. A gifted and welcome voice.
   — Martina Dalton
 
Róisín Ní Neachtain’s practice as a visual artist infuses her poetry with colour, light, and synaesthetic imagery. In a combination of prose and free-form poems, I, bird destabilises reality, conjuring aspects of David Lynch and Marina Abramović. This is a collection for our times – ‘genocide is being perpetrated in a foreign land ... Now is the time for the ‘Screaming Tree’ (‘The White Room’).
   — Amanda Bell
 
ABOUT Róisín Ní Neachtain:
Róisín Ní Neachtain is a writer and artist living in Kildare. She was awarded the Dennis O'Driscoll Literary Bursary Award for Established Writers in 2025, second place at the Red Line and third place at the Maria Edgeworth Competition. Her work has also been shortlisted with Write by the Sea, The Aryamati Poetry Prize for chapbooks and the Fish Publishing Poetry Competition. She has been mentored by Enda Wyley and, in her painting practice, by Brian Maguire.