Róisín Kelly is a writer from Ireland. Her first collection of poetry, Mercy, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2020.
She is currently writing a second collection of poetry, Call of the Void, and her first novel.
Led by Eavan Boland, who is explicitly cited as an influence in Mercy, Kelly returns to women’s lives recent and distant, working poetically to perceive and explore the past. Her debut…. provides a compelling and provocative account of the workings of time. TLS
Mercy… is a debut that approaches both the personal and the political with passionate physicality. Here is a book that repositions the erotic in the poem in a manner that Eavan Boland woud surely have appreciated… Although these poems deal with self and identity, Kelly is a poet alive to the wider world of today, and a poet who refuses to create a polite or easy disconnect between the worlds of past and the present… Kelly is a fearless poet, whose innovative use of the lyric form refreshes a tradition in danger of becoming moribund in Ireland. Poetry Ireland Review.
The collection merges a range of mythologies to explore Kelly’s sense of identity and heritage… Kelly speaks of a capacity to take elements of various traditions and weave them together into a new identity which is at once deeply empowering and deeply feminine. Agenda
Kelly brings her Gravesian language ambitiously to bear on more obviously historical and significant events. Her focus on gender and injustice complicates the profusion of images of the natural world. The Irish Times
I have suggested an affinity between Kelly and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. She may also have learned something from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, that other doyenne of contemporary Irish poetry… By any standard, Róisín Kelly’s Mercy is an impressive debut… The language has cadence and focus. The images are burnished. She is, by turns, visionary, savvy and passionate. London Grip.
The Irish-ness of the poet and the European-ness of the poet are two strong threads running through the collection… The poet sometimes speaks directly and without pretension to the reader, and sometimes to us via the beloved, and it is often an intimate voice, yet there is no trace of narcissism in the poems… This is a fine collection. The High Window
These are expansive poems, rich in pictures and space, frequently evocative… Her delicate patterning of rhyme, controlling carefully the full and the half, offers a shape and texture to these poems which means reading, and re-reading, a great joy… An engaging journey, well worth taking. Dundee University Review of the Arts
What is striking about Kelly’s writing is that she intentionally situates herself within Ireland’s literary tradition, frequently drawing on Yeatsian images like the rose. She is unswerving, however, in her desire to draw romance and realism together, and Kelly revives the symbols of old so that they might be re-spoken in a brazen, drunken voice… Kelly’s poetry is at once tender and savage, steeped in tradition yet brave in expression – she takes readers where they don’t want to go, a feat that most writers attempt, but few achieve. Los Angeles Review of Books
I first came across Róisín Kelly and her work at the Cork International Poetry Festival few years ago, and was struck by the composure, poise and precision of her reading, and also by the intensity, depth and luminescence of her poems. They succeed in being both intimate and personal… but also undoubtedly political. Victoria Kennefick
Mercy was for me a kind of lamplit and starlit exploration of self and wilderness, utterly glorious in its haunted depictions of the human body and the physical landscape. Annemarie Ní Chuirreáin
Róisín Kelly 