She has published widely on twentieth- and twenty-first century British, Irish and American Poetry and is a practitioner of the school of close, attentive reading espoused by critics such as Vendler, Peter Sacks, and Christopher Ricks.
The British critic John Sutherland (author) describes Grief and Meter as "unusually thought provoking" and praises her "refreshingly sharp close readings".
Subsequent chapters explore the working out of Auden’s influence in poetry by Joseph Brodsky, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Seamus Heaney.
This choice of poets reveals Connolly’s opening image of Auden on the steamship to America in January 1939 as a kind of conceptual pun for her interest in transatlantic poetics.
"[7] In relation to her second book Ranches of Isolation, Stephanie Burt writes that Connolly "has a sharp ear for how poetry sounds, for where it originates and where it ends up, and she’s in a good position to say, not just thanks to her knowledge of things Irish and Irish English and British English and American, but thanks to her knowledge about the guts of poems: past and present, early-career and deeply canonical, out-there and close to the heart, outspoken and close to the vest, get attention in Connolly’s personal, thoughtful, pellucid language.