Press and Reviews

‘But what impresses most about the narrative threading New Arcana is the feeling of something revived or even resurrected by Traynor’s strange koans. The voice speaking back at us through the spirit board at the book’s centre feels so true to life that we can almost feel the planchette quivering beneath our fingertips. Ultimately what New Arcana is astute enough to recognise is that the subject of any resurrection necessarily emerges back into the world changed, a little off-centre, forever marked by their dying and the pain of being brought back.’ – James Patterson, RTÉ Culture (Book of the Week)

'A hard-hitting collection, shaded with light and dark, which makes sense of the cruelty of life through the lens of cartomancy and the films of Tim Burton. Inventive and visceral, these poems are songs of grief, pointers of accusation, dissections of trauma and loss. The desperately tender poems in memory of a lost friend, Lydia, are countered by hopeful, gentle poems about the poet’s daughters. A collection which looks at life askance, chronicling what occurs when “angel(s) / look away”.' – Shash Trevett, Poetry Book Society Autumn Bulletin 2025, on New Arcana

‘It is that strong sense of uncanniness throughout Jessica Traynor’s Pit Lullabies that marks it with distinction. The eponymous Pit Lullabies – there are 10 in total – form a wild, exhilarating backbone to this collection where bone is a key word.  A book about motherhood and birth trauma… its roots are firmly entrenched in the natural world… Traynor’s poems, like those of Walter de la Mare, are most deadly when they are pared back, almost child-like.’ – Martina Evans, The Irish Times

'Fierce and profound, Pit Lullabies is one of the vital books of the new Irish poetry.' – Ciarán O’Rourke, New Hibernia Review

‘It’s a beautiful meditation on, among other themes, new parenthood, violence against women, and the destruction of the environment.’ – Liadán Hynes, Sunday Independent

‘But while it may be dark stuff… the language is also wonderful: gothic, Anglo-Saxon, visceral, and well, exhilarating. It’s also attentive to both the tender and the subterranean emotions that arise with the experience of motherhood. More than that, Pit Lullabies harks back to knowledge from ancient times, reminding us of our innate powers as women and as life-givers.’ – Afric McGlinchey, Dublin Review of Books

'Addressing a daughter over a period stretching from foetal scan to birth and beyond, she is broadly concerned with the value as well as the control of darkness. “Try to be the shape that holds the dark,” she advises at the end of 'Pit Lullaby IX'. This exhumation and valuing of the dark may be connected with the breaking of silence and the exposure of institutionalised forms of maternal and child abuse that have been the Irish writer’s preoccupations in some of her previous work. Darkness exhumed, like silence broken, becomes a bright and vital force.' – Carol Rumens, Poem of the Week, The Guardian, on Pit Lullabies

'Traynor's poems lurk in.. liminal spaces between light and dark, joy and fear, real and imagined, so that the world is unsettled and unsettling.' – Jenna Clake, Poetry London, on Pit Lullabies

‘Written with a lightness of touch, these poems are capable of dealing with the big themes – especially those of birth, death or illness…this poet [is] capable of creating canonical work which draws on a contemporary re-thinking of poetic traditions while finding a voice that is wholly her own.’ - Siobhan Campbell on The Quick, Poetry Ireland Review

‘Long-memoried and prioritising the sanctity of all life, The Quick should be praised as a book ‘built to stagger on’ (‘The Quick’) and forge a compelling vision of the future.’ - Jake Morris-Campbell on The Quick, Poetry School

‘Death and the dead are a restless, persistent force in Jessica Traynor’s poetry…The British poet Alice Oswald has said: “people often tell me they turn to poetry for comfort, but I turn to it for discomfort.” Jessica Traynor’s new and second collection is not a book that we would readily turn to for comfort. But perhaps this is exactly what makes The Quick an intriguing read.’ - Enda Wyley on The Quick, The Dublin Review of Books