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Griffin contender:Irish poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has made the international shortlist for the Canada-based Griffin Poetry Prize with her collection, The Sun-fish, published by The Gallery Press. The other three poets on the shortlist are John Glenday, Louise Glück and Susan Wicks. All receive $10,000 (€7,500) to participate in a reading of their work in Toronto the night before the winner of the $65,000 (€49,000) overall prize is announced there on June 3rd.

The judges say the effect of Ní Chuilleanáin’s impressionistic style is like watching a photograph as it develops. “She is a truly imaginative poet, whose imagination is authoritative and transformative. She leads us into altered or emptied landscapes, such as that in The Polio Epidemic, when children were kept indoors, but the poet escapes on a bicycle: ‘I sliced through miles of air/ free as a plague angel descending/ On places buses went . . .’