I’m convinced that when we look back upon the current decade we will come to realise that it has been a golden age for poetry when a succession of impressively talented new poets were discovered by the editors of small poetry presses. Add to that list the name, Katy Mahon, a poet from Northern Ireland, who made her debut in 2022 with a pamphlet, Some Indescribable Cord (Dreich). You only have to read the first poem in this small collection to be impressed.

As the word, ‘cord’, in the title suggests this is a collection about connection: how we are connected to others and to the past. A number of poems explore this theme in terms of the complex nature of relationships. Mask explores how a potentially warm, satisfying connection can be frustrated by someone who seeks to hide his/her true self behind a facade of perfection (a mask of…