Cathy Galvin

Longlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2026

Ethnology draws on the mystical cry for the dead of Cathy Galvin's Irish-speaking ancestors. Within an epic narrative she reclaims place, people and language, creating a bridge between our own times and a Connemara community on the margins of Europe. 

Drawing on classic forms within literary and oral traditions, Ethnology becomes a love song for Connemara, witness to vivid encounters: between the living and the dead and between the poets, folklorists and ethnologists who have written about the West of Ireland for their own agendas.

In her first full-length book of poetry, fragility and strength are finely balanced, focused on the ruins of an island cottage built by her great-grandfather. Here, Cathy Galvin locates humour and joy as well as mourning. The poems give a vivid, original voice to the tradition of keening, of honouring the loss of those we love. 

'Cathy Galvin's rich, complex Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara is a history of Galvin's mother's native Mason Island and a tremendous elegy for her son whose heart is buried there [...] It is also a burning lyrical investigation into the power of language and those who use that power. Ethnology refers to the "elites" - visitors such as folklorists or the ethnographer Charles R Browne, who as well as attempting to steal skulls from Inisboffin, measured the heads of islanders.  [...] Galvin acknowledges the paradox that Ethnology owes as much to the elites' recordings as it does to the Irish language and her upbringing within an Irish family in England. [...] Galvin is verbally adept, a master of many forms, but perhaps it is the further paradox of being so close to a language she didn't understand as a child that creates this hungry, groundbreaking book, brimming with grief and desire'...' – Martina Evans, The Irish Times

‘Ethnology: a love song for Connemara is a tightly focused book. It pursues its themes with a laser-like precision. But Galvin’s world never feels monolithic. For all its emphasis on loss of both people and place, there lies beneath that an abundant sense of life, its meaning and its worth. This is, as the cliché often suggests, a book to return to, a book with real heft and stature.’ – Ian Pople, London Grip

‘a collection that is rooted in the landscape and nuances of Máisean Island and its past inhabitants. Galvin also questions what home and belonging mean when family roots have left their point of origin.’ – Emma Lee, The High Window

'Galvin explores the land of Connemara and uses place to explores themes such as language, belonging and grief. [...]  As the collection progresses, grief is explored: grief for the land, for those who came before her and then finally grief for her son.  It feels like the act of writing and the landscape is allowing the poet to explore these complex feelings, giving the reader space to explore them alongside her.' – Katie Lane, The School Librarian, on Ethnology: a love song for Connemara

'A four part collection which is a paean to the West of Ireland, specifically Másiun Island, the home of the poet's maternal ancestors. In a sweeping enquiry into lineage, landscape and the wounds left by colonisation, Galvin takes the family cottage she has inherited, now derelict, as a focus for memory and ghosts. [...] The epigraph, Nì bás, ach fás ('Not death but growth') reflects the often numinous quality of Galvin's writing at its best, where suffering, the desire to reabsorb that which is gone, often through intensely physical language, gestures towards transcendence, a wished-for coming home...' – Theresa Sowerby, Orbis, on Ethnology: a love song for Connemara

'Here the west of Ireland comes alive, island life and sea-shore culture caught in language and rhythms that are natural to the themes, in both the colloquial and the formal, in the precision of the characterisations and the imagery. The personal level of the work is held close and carries the whole, forming a true history of the lives of people on the margins. This is a profound achievement.' – John F. Deane 

'Years since I was so moved by a new collection. Cathy Galvin writes from close knowledge, in a variety of forms and voices, with a coherent drive and many branchings that never leave the heart of the matter. In the later part of the book her grief over her son’s death is deep and always palpable but is never – so to speak – let loose. Everything in this book wants saying. It’s urgent and, like all good poetry, it ramifies far beyond the poet’s own self.' – David Constantine

'The journey to ruins of Cathy Galvin’s inherited island cottage is made through the veins, organically. These intensely lyrical poems are a paean to south Connemara and a vanishing way of life, where land, body and spirit merge in incantations of salt and turf, deep and true as "an umbilical cord of love".' – Pascale Petit

'The collection is thoughtful, provocative, and symphonic with an admirable blending of form. Cathy Galvin is a maker of storied memory.' – David Morley

'Ethnology is a book of wonders, poised on that moment when legends become myth and songs become the wind.' – Richard Skinner

'To all lovers of poetry and powerful new writing, here is one of the books of the year, Ethnology by Cathy Galvin. Its poems explore the ghost-traces of Cathy's ancestors on the little-known Mason Island off the south Connemara coast, from the years following the Great Famine to Cathy's own looping-back through time. She reads the beauty and silences of the island like a spirit-board of lives long gone but animate still. Here, women's fingers pull 'dark nights over their needles' and tears are lost to the salt of the tides. Here, colonial authorities record a 'barren district' with 'no history', and measure men's heads as anthropological specimens - though they must admit 'imbecility' is 'rare'. These poems are compassionate and clear-eyed; stark as the island's wind-shot ruins and necessary as the rowing of a body home. Ethnology is a hymn and a reckoning; a keening and, above all, a love-song: a 'rope of a narrative, an umbilical cord of love'.' –  Alison MacLeod

 

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