“Santiago Sketches has the immediacy of a diary kept on the go, and the colour, grace and formal definition of poetry. It’s full of youth, the readiness to explore, learn and play, and the life lived in public spaces that young people share with the “stumbling camp followers” of history”
—Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

“[Santiago Sketches] represents a distinct advance in his work. Those who want to experience something of the inner Spain through an Irish imagination will value this book … His feelings for the ....cultures of Ireland, Europe, and the Americas, make David McLoghlin a unique voice in modern Irish writing.”
—Peter Costello, The Irish Catholic newspaper, February 2018

“Santiago Sketches is a gift-box brimming with luminous local details of a loved place through which--over a space of nine months--the poet moves like a pilgrim of the senses, offering in poem after poem what’s been seen, felt, smelled, heard; what’s been touched, tasted, and understood.”
—Eamon Grennan

Santiago Sketches is a book of short, imagistic poems entirely set in Santiago de Compostela, where the small and the local are revealed to be universal, mirroring the process whereby this small city near Finis Terrae (the end of the earth to the Romans) became central to human patrimony and declared a world heritage site by UNESCO. Since the 12th-century Codex Calixtinus – the first Camino de Santiago guidebook – many books have been written about the paths to Santiago. Santiago Sketches is one of the first book in English about a year in that city to which millions have travelled, but which most arriving pilgrims depart after a brief stay. Here, McLoghlin uses his fluency in Spanish and gallego, and his background as a Hispanist, to capture what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being”, and translate them to us.