The Sweeny is very moving. It's extraordinary to come across a long poem where there is no 'link writing' - in Sweeny the passion, the authentic voice is miraculously, breathlessly sustained. I'm impressed by the masterly purity of [the] language . . . . Is Sweeny a masterpiece? I think it is.
(Niall Montgomery)

His characteristic strengths are astonishing graces of language . . . he can fuse an intricate argument with plain and lovely images and make all moving.
(Eavan Boland, Irish Times)

Joyce has put himself to school in the techniques of many poetic traditions, and the results are often beautiful and subtly complex.
(Robert Archambeau, Notre Dame Review)

His striking unwillingness to repeat himself formally is central to his work . . . . I find myself almost surprised, after having lived with this body of work for several months, at how difficult I now find it to think of the landscape of contemporary poetry without it.  This is a book that deserves to find a wide and diverse readership.
(Nate Dorward, Chicago Review)

Joyce has been exiled in Cork for many years. But he has not abandoned his gift, nor has the gift of poetry abandoned him.
(Tom McCarthy, Poetry Ireland Review)

I would have to say that Joyce is one of the major poets on either side of the Irish Sea.
(Tony Frazer, Shearsman Magazine)

For all their complexity his orchestrations stay close to a voiced order: Even at their most abstract Joyce's poems retain the texture of a speaking voice . . . . The constant interweaving of voices, their diversity and fragmentariness, the conjunction of randomness and order, are part of an aesthetic which refuses the comforts of the single perspective and the biographical imperatives which drive so much poetry . . . . The work is consistently interesting, formally engaging, wide ranging and risky: altogether an unmissable collection.
(Peter Sirr, Poetry Ireland Review)

. . . a transmutation of intimate anguish into a brilliant work of art.
(James Keery, Poetry Review)

Here, without doubt, Joyce reaches a new terrain of language . . . . This is a volume that extends irrevocably the range of what Irish poets can do.
(David Lloyd, Irish Times)

During the past few years Joyce has enjoyed an explosion of creative power, producing a succession of increasingly ambitious poems distinguished by virtuosity, subtlety, maturity, and great beauty . . . . Joyce's inventiveness, restlessness, range - these qualities in operation . . . are simply stunning.
(J.C.C.Mays, the Dublin Review)