Description Tom French has steadily built a distinct, consistent and coherent body of work. His clear lyrics and narrative poems display a virtuosity of sentence and stanza. Poems embrace domestic and historic subject matter and touch on contemporary global unrest. From field notes at the back of his house to his daughter’s school tour, from a poem centred on an image of joy in the immediate aftermath of a school’s rugby final to a Tipperary epithalamion, Tom French reaches far. But ‘The Road from Schiphol’, a harrowing account of a pilgrimage to the site of a family tragedy, is a new kind of achievement. The Convent of Mercy, blending wry humour and deep empathy, is the work of a poet ‘in complete command of his materials’ (Thomas McCarthy, Dublin Review of Books). The Convent of Mercy is Tom French’s eighth poetry collection published by The Gallery Press.
