Adrian Mitchell: “Tim Cunningham’s poems are as various and fascinating as the animals in Noah’s Ark. He has a most musical ear, a keen eye and an open heart. His aim is true. He writes beautiful poems.”
Fleur Adcock: “. . . hope readers will enjoy his work as much as I have.”
Peter Reading: “Don Marcelino’s Daughter contains pieces which are observantly compassionate, sympathetically sensitive and even portentous, where the reader continues to be assailed by the poems’ acidulated precipitation, long after a first perusal.” (The Times Literary Supplement)
Herbert Lomas: “Tim Cunningham is at his best rewriting myths and parables . . . He’s also at his best when his quirky imagination takes off from the documentation of actuality.” (Ambit)
Susan Burns: “This is sensitive, assured writing.” (The North)
R V Bailey: Tim Cunningham is one of those Irishmen who can move easily from wit to feeling. ‘Errata’ has affinities with Roger Caldwell’s poetry of ideas, but is funnier:
‘On the evening of the seventh day
Some ass sat on the button and annihilated
Man. God winced a little having told
The press this guy was made in His own image.’
But while wit, satire and irony demand a due authorial distancing to be effective, a greater tact still is needed to convey movingly that which you feel emotionally about. In two poems that centre on the poet’s father, ‘The Corbally Plot’ and, especially, ‘Hallowe’en’, human warmth is liberated: ‘My father’s absence was always there
At Christmas, birthdays and hallowe’en
. . . how would Leonardo paint
A candle hurting for its flame?’
(Cinnamon Press)