"A Pat Boran poem may feel like sharing a pint as he draws you in with his engaging tone: ‘Jamie / who I didn’t really know but always / stopped to talk, in passing’ (‘Neighbours Make a Neighbourhood’), but don’t be fooled, for he flips in a trice into Joycean epiphanies and meditations on the human condition, poems resonating off one another in a complex web of associations… Along with his seemingly endlessly interweaving of strands, he can also really knock out an individual poem that says something. At the same time as creating a nest of associations, he is also constructing a honeycomb of really cracking stand-alone poems – where content, and form cohere…"
A very positive and encouraging review of Hedge School (Dedalus Press, 2024) by Belinda Cooke at The High Window.
