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Ellen Nic Thomás is a bilingual poet from Dublin. She graduated from Trinity College with a BA in English and Irish. Her work has been published by headstuff.org, Tales From the Forest and The Attic. “Beochaoineadh Máthar Maoise”and other poems by Ellen Nic Thomás |
The writer Máire Dinny Wren is from Gaoth Dobhair in Co. Donegal. She writes poetry and short stories. Coiscéim published her first collection of poetry, Ó Bhile go Bile, in 2011. Éabhlóid published her collection of short stories, Go mbeinnse choíche saor, in 2016 and Éabhlóid also published her second poetry collection, Tine Ghealáin in 2019. Her work has been published in Duillí Éireann, Comhar, an tUltach, Feasta, The Bramley, Strokestown Poetry Anthology 3 and four of her stories were published by Éabhlóid in the short story collection, Go dtí an lá bán in 2012. Máire has won many literary prizes over the years, including, comórtas filíochta Focail Aniar Aduaidh in 2017 for her poem ‘An Fidléir’. In 2016 she won the Gael Linn poetry competition Ó Pheann na nGael. She won Comórtas Filíochta Uí Néill in 2011 and one of her poems was on the short list for Duais de hÍde in 2019. She was the winner of duais Fhoras na Gaeilge ag Listowel Writers’ Week in 2010 with her short story ‘Ag Téarnamh chun Baile’. A radio adaption of her short story ‘Thar an Tairseach’ was broadcast by Drama on One, RTÉ radio and was shortlisted for Prix Europa 2013. |
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Ceathrúintí Mháire Ní Ógáin’ and ‘A fhir dar fhulaingeas’ by Máire Mhac an tSaoi |
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Siobhan's website |
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Ann Leahy’s first collection, The Woman who Lived her Life Backwards (Arlen House, 2008), won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Individual poems have twice been commended in the British National Poetry Competition and have also won or been placed in many competitions. Most recently, a new poem came second in the Yeovil Literary Prize, 2019, another was a prize-winner in the Troubadour International Prize, 2018. Poems have been widely published in Irish and British journals (including The North, Poetry Ireland Review, Stand, AGENDA, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Cyphers) and have been included in several anthologies. She used to work as a lawyer and now works as a policy analyst and researcher. She recently returned to writing poetry after taken a break from it while completing a PhD on ageing and disability. She grew up in Borrisoleigh, Co. Tipperary, and lives in Dublin. |
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The River was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, given for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place. In 2016 Jane won the Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry and the inaugural Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year Award. She was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Literary Bursary in 2017. Jane holds a BA in English & Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin, an MPhil in Writing from the University of South Wales, and has a background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. She grew up on a farm in Roscommon and now lives with her partner in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow, where she combines writing with her work as a creative writing tutor and group facilitator.
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[ Image: Malachi O'Doherty Maureen Boyle lives in Belfast. She began writing as a child in Sion Mills, County Tyrone, winning a UNESCO medal for a book of poems in 1979 at eighteen. She studied English and History in Trinity in Dublin and did postgraduate work in UEA and UU. In 2005 she was awarded the Master’s in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. She has won various awards including the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize in 2007; the Strokestown International Poetry Prize in the same year and in 2013 she won the Fish Short Memoir Prize. She has received support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in the form of Individual Arts, Aces and Travel Awards. In 2008 she was commissioned to write a poem on the Crown Bar in Belfast for a BBC documentary and some of her work has been translated into German. In 2017 she was awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry’s Inaugural Travel Bursary for work on Anne More, the wife of John Donne. In November 2018 her poem, The Nunwell Letter, was runner-up in the Coast-to-Coast Single Poet Competition for a stitched limited edition, by artist Maria Izakova-Bennett in Liverpool. In January 2019 a long poem on Strabane will be broadcast on Radio 4 in Conversations on a Bench. Her debut collection, The Work of a Winter was published by Arlen House Press, Dublin and has just come out as a second edition. She taught Creative Writing with the Open University for ten years and teaches English in St Dominic’s Grammar School in Belfast. Lilacs From the Field Of Mars and other poems by Maureen Boyle |
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Roberta Beary identifies as gender-expansive and writes to connect with the disenfranchised, to let them know they are not alone. She is the author of Deflection (Accents, 2015), nothing left to say (King’s Road Press, 2009) and The Unworn Necklace (Snapshot Press, 2007, 5th ed. 2017) which was a finalist in the Poetry Society of America annual book awards. Beary is the editor of the haiku anthologies Wishbone Moon (Jacar Press, 2018), fresh paint (Red Moon Press, 2014), 7 (Jacar Press, 2013), dandelion clocks (HSA, 2008) and fish in love (HSA, 2006). Her work appears in Rattle, KYSO Flash, Cultural Weekly, 100 Word Story, and Haiku In English The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013). Beary’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net and multiple Pushcart Prizes. She lives in County Mayo, Ireland where she edits haibun for the journal Modern Haiku. |
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Eva O'Connor is a writer and performer from Ogonnelloe, Co.Clare She has written for stage, screen and radio. Her plays include My Name is Saoirse, Overshadowed , Maz and Bricks, and MUSTARD (winner of Fringe First Award 2019). Her short story Midnight Sandwich was aired on BBC Radio 4. |
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Clodagh Mooney Duggan is an emerging poet. She originally trained as an actor, graduating from The Gaiety School of Acting in 2013. Since then, she has begun writing for the stage and is currently writing Made from Paper, which will be premiere in Dublin 2020 in The Scene and Heard Festival. The Women Who Loved Me & The Women Who Couldn’t will be her first published collection. |
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Deirdre Gallagher is a teacher and writer with works published in A New Ulster, Crossways Literary Magazine, Poethead, Comhar, and Feasta. She recognizes the importance of gender perspective and equality, and values the role emotional literacy has to play in our evolving world. A language enthusiast, she believes that we can dispel the shadows cast by checkered history, disconnection and poor self-image to see the emergence of a bright, compassionate and equitable future which celebrates and benefits from the immense advantages of multilingualism. |
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CLICK HERE to receive notifications of readings, workshops and other poetry events. |
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Rosalin Blue is a cultural scientist, translator, and poet who began performing in 1995 in Hildesheim, Germany. Linked to the literary scene in Ireland since 2000, her poetic home is O Bhéal in Cork. She has performed in Cork City and County, Limerick, Galway, and Dublin, and at festivals like the Electric Picnic and the LINGO Spoken Word Festival. Blue’s poems have been published in Southword and the Five Words Volumes in Cork, Revival Poetry, Stanzas in Limerick, and in Crannóg Magazine, Galway. She has been included in two Cork Anthologies, On the Banks (2016) and A Journey Called Home (2018). Her poetry collection In the Consciousness of Earth was published by Lapwing, Belfast in 2012, and her translation of love-poetry by the German Expressionist August Stramm You. Lovepoems & Posthumous Love Poems came out in 2015. |
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Jane Burn's poems have appeared in many magazines, such as Butcher’s Dog, The Interpreter’s House, Obsessed With Pipework, The Curlew, The Fenland Reed, Strix, Under the Radar, Bare Fiction, The Rialto, Prole, Long Poem Magazine, Elsewhere, Crannog, Domestic Cherry, Iota Poetry, The Poet’s Republic, Eye Flash Poetry, Finished Creatures and the Oxford English Journal. Her poems have also been published in anthologies from The Emma Press and Seren. Her poems are regularly placed in competitions and she has been nominated for both The Pushcart and the Forward Prize. |
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Breda Spaight is a poet and novelist from Ireland. Her poems are published widely in Ireland and abroad, including The SHOp, Burning Bush 2, Banshee, Orbis, Envoi, Atticus Review (US), Communion (AUS),The Ofi Press, and others. She is the 2016 winner of the Boyle Arts Festival Poetry Competition, and runner up in the iYeats International Poetry Prize. |
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Susan Kelly is from Westport, Co Mayo. Her work has appeared in Cyphers, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stony Thursday Book, Crannóg, Revival, Abridged, The London Magazine, Boyne Berries, The Weary Blues, Burning Bush 2, wordlegs.com and was short-listed for the Writing Spirit Award 2010. She was a featured reader at Over the Edge in Galway 2011, shortlisted for the New Writer of the Year 2013 and longlisted for the 2014 WOW award. |
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Image Faber[/caption]
Dorothy Molloy (1942-2004) was born in Ballina, Co. Mayo in 1942. She studied languages at University College Dublin, after which she went to live in Madrid and Barcelona. During her time in Spain, she worked as a researcher, as a journalist, and as an arts administrator. She also had considerable success as a painter, winning several prizes and exhibiting widely. After her return to Ireland in 1979, she continued painting but also began writing poetry. her first book of poems Hare Soup was published in 2004 (Faber and Faber). The Poems of Dorothy Molloy will be launched in November 2019. More information at Faber. |
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Eithne’s first poetry collection Earth Music was published by Turas Press in April 2019. |
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Originally from the village of Eglinton in Derry, Gillian Hamill has lived in Dublin for the past 12 years (intermingled with stints in Galway, Waterford and Nice). She has a BA in English Studies from Trinity College, Dublin and a MA in Journalism from NUI Galway. She is currently the editor of trade publication, ShelfLife magazine and has acted in a number of theatre productions. Gillian started writing poetry in late 2014.
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Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a novelist, poet and short fiction writer. She was born in Dublin in 1970 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, Dublin City University and NUI Galway. Her first full poetry collection Molly’s Daughter appeared in the ¡DIVAS! Anthology New Irish Women’s Writing (Arlen House). Her bilingual poetry collection Tattoo:Tatú (Arlen House, 2007) was shortlisted for the 2008 Rupert and Eithne Strong Award. A pamphlet Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car (Templar, 2009) was one of four winners of the 2009 Templar Poetry Pamphlet competition. Nuala’s début novel You (New Island, 2010) was called ‘a heart-warmer’ by The Irish Times and ‘a gem’ by The Irish Examiner. Her third short story collection Nude (Salt, 2009) was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize.
Nuala teaches creative writing part-time and has won many literary prizes, including RTÉ Radio’s Francis MacManus Award, the inaugural Cúirt New Writing Prize, the inaugural Jonathan Swift Award and the Cecil Day Lewis Award. She has twice been nominated for a Hennessy Award, and was awarded Arts Council Bursaries in Literature in 2004 and 2009.
Her poetry and fiction have been published and anthologised in Ireland, the UK, France, Canada, Australia and the USA; and have been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 and Lyric FM. Her residencies have included a poetry writing project with long-term elderly residents in Merlin Park Hospital, Galway, and Writer-in-Residence at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature. Nuala lives in County Galway with her husband and three children. (Salmon)
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For more information visit aliceekinsella.com or Facebook.com/AliceEKinsella |
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Mary O’Connell has had poems published in Southword, Best of Irish Poetry 2008, and the Café Review, (Portland ME). She taught languages and English and now lives in Cork city. She also had some success reciting her work in Strokestown and Derry. She has been fortunate to have been mentored by Paddy Galvin and Greg O’Donoghue in a workshop at the Munster Literature Centre, and often writes about nature and classical mythology, as well as taking an ironic look at public figures and events. A regular at O Bhéal, she has twice been asked to read for visiting American students.
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Trish Bennett hails from County Leitrim. She’s got the breeze of Thur (the mountain, not the God) in her blood. She crossed the border to study over twenty years ago and was charmed into staying by a Belfast biker. They have settled themselves into a small cabin near the lakeshore in Fermanagh, and try to keep the noise down in their bee-loud glade. Bennett writes about the shenanigans of her family and other creatures. Sometimes she rants. She was a finalist in seven poetry competitions in the past two years, including North West Words, The Percy French, Bailieborough, and The Bangor Literary Journal, and has won The Leitrim Guardian Literary Award for poetry twice. Bennett is a Professional Member of the Irish Writers Centre.
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Bernadette Gallagher, one of eight children, was born by the seaside in Donegal in 1959 and now lives on a hillside in County Cork. At 22 years of age she accepted an offer of a job in Baghdad where she lived and worked for two years. Ever since she has had a special affinity with the people of the Middle East. While working full-time Bernadette studied for a B.Sc. in Information Technology and an M.Sc. in Internet Systems and continues to work full time now as a project manager.She has been writing a personal journal for many years and her poetry has been published in print in Boyne Berries, Ropes 2016 and Stanzas, and online at HeadStuff.org, Picaroon Poetry and The Incubator Journal. On most Monday evenings Bernadette reads at the Open Mic during the Ó Bhéal Weekly Poetry event in Cork. |
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Deirdre Daly is a writer living in Dublin, Ireland. Her poetry has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Magma, Banshee, The Penny Dreadful and The Irish Times amongst others. She was nominated for a Hennessy New Irish Writing award and received a special commendation in the Patrick Kavanagh poetry award in 2017. |
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Emma Gleeson lives in Dublin. Her writing adventures include poems, cultural reviews, and essays. She has worked in the theatre industry as a costume designer and events coordinator, and lectures on sustainability. She has a BA in Drama & Theatre and an MA in Fashion History. Instagram: @emmajgleeson |
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Gaynor is a member of Holywood Writers’ Group, The Irish Writers Centre and Women Aloud NI. She also volunteers for EastSide Arts during their summer festival and the CS Lewis festival in November. Gaynor is a keen amateur photographer and has had some of her photography published in journals and anthologies, also.
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'Aleph to Taf' and other poems are © Emma McKervey |
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Author image © Anna Murray Christine Murray is a poet and web developer. She developed Poethead; a poetry blog in 2008. She graduated in Art History and English Literature at UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy. She qualified and has worked as a city and guilds conservation stone cutter with the Office of Public Works/Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland. Her restoration stone work is largely architectural, she worked in Counties Limerick and Kerry, and was based at Ross Castle at Loch Lein (Killarney, Co. Kerry) and in Ardfert Cathedral among other places. She is primarily a page poet but has written poetry for vocal performance. Her ‘Lament for Three Women’s Voices‘ was performed at The Béal Festival of New Music and Poetry (Smock Alley Theatre, 2012). She is currently archiving materials related to Fired! Irish Women poets at RASCAL (QUB) Her chapbook Three Red Things was published by Smithereens Press (2013). A small collection of interrelated poems in series and sequence Cycles was published by Lapwing Press (2013). A book-length poem The Blind was published by Oneiros Books (2013). Her second book-length poem She published by Oneiros Books (2014). A chapbook Signature published by Bone Orchard Press (2014). Her work is included in, And Agamemnon Dead; an alternative collection of Irish poetry.(Eds, Peter O’Neill and Walter Ruhlmann, 2015).“A Modern Encounter with ‘Foebus abierat’: On Eavan Boland’s “Phoebus Was Gone, all Gone, His Journey Over” in Eavan Boland: Inside History (published Arlen House, Eds, Nessa O’Mahony and Siobhán Campbell, 2016). All The Worlds Between, (Anthology, eds, Srilata Krishnan and Fióna Bolger, Yoda Publishing, 2017), The Gladstone Readings, (Anthology, Ed. Peter O’Neill, Famous Seamus Publishing, 2017). Her third chapbook A Hierarchy Of Halls was published in February 2018 (Smithereens Press). Bind was published in October 2018 (Turas Press). Gold Friend is forthcoming in late 2020 (Turas Press). § Recours au Poème: Poésies & Mondes Poétiques
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Patricia Walsh was born in Mourneabbey, Co Cork, Ireland, and was educated in University College Cork, graduating with an MA in Archaeology in 2000. Previously she has published one collection of poetry, titled Continuity Errors (Lapwing Press 2010) Her poetry is published in The Fractured Nuance; Revival Magazine; Ink Sweat and Tears; Drunk Monkeys; Hesterglock Press; Linnet’s Wing, Narrator International, and The Evening Echo, a local Cork newspaper with a wide circulation. She was the featured artist for June 2015 in the Rain Party Disaster Journal. In addition, She has also published a novel, titled The Quest for Lost Eire, in 2014. |
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Marie Hanna Curran holds an Honours Degree in Equine Science and is qualified as an Accounting Technician. However, her time is now spent farming words as she refuses to allow illness – Myalgic Encephalomyelitis – impact her quest to fill the world with words. Her articles have appeared in the Galway Independent, Connacht Tribune and Irish Independent and her regular column sits between the pages of the magazine Athenry News and Views. Along with freelance writing, her poems and short stories have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies across the globe and her solo collection of poetry Observant Observings were published by Tayen Lane Publishing in 2014. |
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Anamaría Crowe Serrano is a poet and translator born in Ireland to an Irish father and a Spanish mother. She grew up bilingually, straddling cultures, rarely with her nose out of a book. Languages have always fascinated her to the extent that she has never stopped learning or improving her knowledge of them. She enjoys cross-cultural and cross-genre exchanges with artists and poets. Much of her work is the result of such collaborations. With a B.A. (Hons) in Spanish and French from Trinity College Dublin, Anamaría went on to do an M.A. in Translation Studies at Dublin City University. Since then, she has worked in localization (translating hardware and software from English to Spanish), has been a reader for the blind, and occasionally teaches Spanish. For over 15 years she has translated poetry from Spanish and Italian to English. Anamaría is the recipient of two awards from the Arts Council of Ireland to further her writing. Her translations have won many prizes abroad and her own poetry has been anthologised in Census (Seven Towers), Landing Places (Dedalus), Pomeriggio (Leconte) and other publications. She is currently translations editor for Colony Journal
Jezebel |
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Lorraine Carey from Donegal, now lives in Co. Kerry. Her work has been published in the following journals; The Honest Ulsterman, A New Ulster, Proletarian, Stanzas Limerick, Quail Bell, The Galway Review, Vine Leaves, Poetry Breakfast, Olentangy Review and Live Encounters. Her first collection of poetry will be published this summer.
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Her poetry has been widely broadcast, translated and anthologised including in, The Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, USA (2010), The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women Poets, USA (2011), Femmes d'Irlande en Poésie, 1973-2013, ed Clíona Ní Ríordáin, Lines of Vision, The National Gallery of Ireland, 2014. She holds a B.Ed with a distinction in English Literature, was the recipient of an M.A in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, was the inaugural winner of the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize and has received many Arts Council Literature Bursaries for her writing. In 2014 she was the recipient of a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for her poetry. In recent years she has been Poet- at -Work in the Coombe Maternity Hospital, Dublin and Writer in Residence at The Marino Institute of Education, Dublin. Enda Wyley’s books for children from O'Brien Press are Boo and Bear and The Silver Notebook. Her book I Won’t Go to China ! was awarded a Reading Association of Ireland Special Merit Award 2011. Enda Wyley was elected to Aosdána in March 2015. Enda Wyley Reviews ‘New and Selected’ seems the perfectly suited appellation for the work on offer here. Ms. Wyley’s poems are perpetually fresh, utterly scrutinized, marked by vigor and virtuosity, arriving on the page as accomplished things, like settled law, fit for the long haul language calls us to.’ Thomas Lynch, Poet, 2014. ‘Enda Wyley’s poems are remarkable for the way they communicate warm feeling through their lightness of touch and clarity of colour.’ 'Enda Wyley is a true poet. To Wake To This articulates a subtle, dreamy apprehension through diction and imagery all the writer’s own.' ‘Her imagery, honesty and insight make this a first-rate work.’
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Jennifer Matthews writes poetry and is editor of the Long Story, Short Journal. Originally from Missouri, USA she has been living in Ireland for over a decade, and is a citizen of both countries. Her poetry has been published in, or is forthcoming from Banshee, Poetry International — Ireland, The Stinging Fly, Mslexia, The Pickled Body, Burning Bush 2, Abridged, Revival, Necessary Fiction, Poetry Salzburg, Foma & Fontanelles, and Cork Literary Review, and anthologised in Dedalus’s collection of immigrant poetry in Ireland, Landing Places (2010). In 2015 she was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. A chapbook of her poetry, Rootless, is available to read free online at Smithereens Press. Rootless by Jennifer Matthews (Smithereens Press 2015) |
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"My greatest regret throughout the process has been how little credit she gives herself, for example she does not mention a paper she gave in the Royal Irish Academy in 1916 or her contribution to the article on dyes in Encyclopedia Britannica or her volume of poetry, Magnificat, or contributing to the Book of St Ultan, or being a founder member of Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe (the masks of Tragedy and Comedy she made for the Gate theatre are now on a wall in the Taibhdhearc) and the Galway Art Club, where she exhibited for years, or making costumes for Micheál Mac Liammóir in 1928, or being responsible for Oisín Kelly deciding to become a sculptor – he was one of very many who said that she enabled them to do the right thing for their own fulfillment. When she wrote it was in order to provide a history of her times and an insight into what made her family so strange. Like many of her generation she did not write much about her own feelings and her humourous and optimistic nature does not really come through in her writing. I would like to have been able to put that in but could not in all faith do so. “ It is also worth noting that Joe ( Joseph Mary Plunkett) named her as literary executor, and she edited his Collected Poems in 1916.
100 Irish Women Poets at Elliptical Movements
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Photo by Alistair Livingstone
Csilla Toldy was born in Budapest. After a long odyssey in Europe she entered the UK with a writer’s visa to work on films and ended up living in Northern Ireland in 1998. Her prose appeared in Southword, Black Mountain Review and anthology, Fortnight, The Incubator Journal, Strictly Writing and Cutalongstory. Her poetry was published online and in print literary magazines, such as Snakeskin and Poetry24, Savitri, Lagan Online, Headstuff, Visible Verse, A New Ulster and in two chapbooks published by Lapwing Belfast: Red Roots – Orange Sky and The Emigrant Woman’s Tale. Csilla makes videopoems, available on her website: www.csillatoldy.co.uk & https://soundcloud.com/ctoldy |
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Shortlisted Vallum Poetry Award (Montreal) 2012. Poem for Patience 2015, 2016 and 2017. |
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Rita Ann Higgins’s readings are legendary. Raucous, anarchic, witty and sympathetic, her poems chronicle the lives of the Irish dispossessed in ways that are both provocative and heart-warming. Her next collection Tongulish was published in April 2016 by Bloodaxe. |
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She’s taken part in The Big Renga, a month-long collaborative poem, and was interviewed by Sara Cox on BBC Radio 2 about this. She is a Scottish Poetry Library Ambassador, a member of the Federation of Writers (Scotland), has been interviewed by children and parents in Dubai at a poetry workshop there, helps with the social media for the cross-community group Women Aloud NI, is part of the FreshAyr initiative and their poetry events, and she runs The Moving On Poetry Group weekly in Kilmarnock. |
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Barbara Smith lives in County Louth, Ireland. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast. Her achievements include being shortlisted for the UK Smith/Doorstop Poetry Pamphlet competition 2009, a prize-winner at Scotland’s 2009 Wigtown Poetry Competition, and recipient of the Annie Deeny 2009/10 bursary awarded by the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for Artists and Writers, Ireland. Her first collection, Kairos, was published by Doghouse Books in 2007 and a second followed in 2012, The Angels’ Share. She is a frequent reader with The Poetry Divas, a collective that read at festivals such as Electric Picnic. |
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Jessica Traynor is from Dublin. Her first collection, Liffey Swim, was published by Dedalus Press in 2014. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, The Raving Beauties Anthology (Bloodaxe), Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History, If Ever You Go (2014 Dublin One City One Book), The Irish Times, Peloton (Templar Poetry), New Planet Cabaret (New Island Books), The Pickled Body, Burning Bush II, Southword, The SHOp, Wordlegs, The Moth, Poetry 24, The Stinging Fly, and New Irish Writing among others. She is the 2014 recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary. She was named Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year in 2013 and was highly commended at the 2013 Patrick Kavanagh Award. She won the 2011 Single Poem Competition at Listowel Writer’s Week. She received a Literature Bursary from Dublin City Council in 2010 and in was part of the 2009 Poetry Ireland Introduction Series. Jessica works as Literary Reader for the Abbey Theatre and teaches creative writing courses through Big Smoke Writing Factory and the Irish Writers Centre. She also works as a freelance dramaturg. |
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"Whistleblower" and other poems by Nicki Griffin
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She occasionally retweets other peoples’ interesting posts at @joburnspoems |
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Publications: Agenda; Tridae (in translation to Spanish); Poetry NZ; Skylight47, Crannog, Ropes, The Stinging Fly, Abridged, New Irish Writing, North West Words; Stony Thursday Book, anthology Balancing Act, The First Cut, Shot Glass Journal, The Galway Review; and book Yeats150. |
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“Elaine Feeney is the freshest, most engaging and certainly the most provocative female poet to come out of Ireland in the last decade. Her poem ” Mass”, is both gloriously funny, bitter-sweet in the astuteness of its observations and a brilliant, sly window into the Irish female Catholic experience. Her use of irony is delicious. Her comments on the human condition, which run throughout her lines, are in the tradition of Dean Swift and she rightfully takes her place alongside Eavan Boland and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill as a very, very important Irish voice.” Fionnuala Flanagan, California 2013 (Praise for The Radio was Gospel, 2013, Salmon) “A choice collection of poetry, one not to be overlooked, 5 Stars” Midwest Book Review, USA, (Praise for Where’s Katie? 2010, Salmon Poetry). |
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Sarah O’Connor is originally from Tipperary. She studied in UCC and Boston College, and she now lives in Dublin. She previously worked in publishing and now works in politics. She is working on her first novel and on a collection of poetry. She has been published by Wordlegs and The Weary Blues. Sarah O’Connor blogs at The Ghost Station & tweets at @theghoststation |
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Some of her poetry can be found at poetry4on.blogspot.com |
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Anna Walsh at The HU |
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Some of her poems are available in online archives, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Troubles Archive and the Poetry Ireland archive. Some have been exhibited in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast and Derry’s Central Library. One was made into a sculpture and is on permanent display in Down Arts Centre, Downpatrick. She has had poems in anthologies – The Stony Thursday Book, Aesthetica Creative Writing, Washing Windows, On the Grass When I Arrive, Something About Home – in magazines such as Abridged, Poetry Ireland, The Dickens, Mslexia, Irish Feminist Review, Boyne Berries, Skylight 47, Crannog, Banshee, Acumen, North West Words, Ulla’s Nib, Fortnight, the South Bank Magazine, and also online, in Four X Four and on a website for psychotherapists. She has won the Down Arts, Mourne Observer and Segora poetry prizes and has been listed in competitions.
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She has published four collections of poems in Irish, An Dealg Droighin (1981), Féar Suaithinseach (1984), Feis(1991) and Cead Aighnis (1998). From The Gallery Press. |
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She is a featured poet in the winter 2017 New Hibernia Review, University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. She won the 2016 UK Bare Fiction Flash Fiction competition. Eleanor holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin, an MA in Cultural History (Hons) University of Northumbria, a BA (Hons 1st), Open University. She is Programme Curator for Dromineer Literary Festival. She is helm and Press Officer for Lough Derg RNLI Lifeboat. She began her career as a nurse and midwife. |
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www.kerrieobrien.com |
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The Hare Arch by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne |
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Maria Wallace (Maria Teresa Mir Ros) was born in Catalonia, but lived her teenage years in Chile. She later came to Ireland where she has now settled. She has a BA in English and Spanish Literature, 2004, an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature, 2005. She won the Hennessy Literary Awards, Poetry Section, 2006. Her work has been published widely in Ireland, England, Italy, Australia and Catalonia. Winner of The Scottish International Poetry Competition, The Oliver Goldsmith Competition, Cecil Day Lewis Awards, Moore Literary Convention, Cavan Crystal Awards, William Allingham Festival. She participated in the ISLA Festival (Ireland, Spain and Latin America), 2015, and has published Second Shadow, 2010, and The blue of distance, 2014, two bilingual collections (English - Catalan), a third one to come out within the year. She has taught Spanish, French, Art and Creative Writing. She facilitates Virginia House Creative Writers a group she founded in 1996, and has edited three volumes of their work.
Moving Like Anemones and Other Poems by Lorna Shaughnessy
Self Portrait as a She Wolf and other poems by Breda Wall Ryan |
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The Poet O’Kane
Website: A Dreaming Skin
Mary Noonan lives in Cork. Her poems have been published in The Dark Horse, The North, Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Threepenny Review, Cyphers, The Stinging Fly, Wasafiri and Best of Irish Poetry 2010. She won the Listowel Poetry Collection Prize in 2010. Her first collection – The Fado House (Dedalus Press, 2012) – was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for a First Collection (2013) and the Strong/Shine Award (2013).
Sarah Clancy has been shortlisted for several poetry prizes including the Listowel Collection of Poetry Competition and the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Her first book of poetry, Stacey and the Mechanical Bull, was published by Lapwing Press Belfast in December 2010 and a further selection of her work was published in June 2011 by Doire Press. Her poems have been published in Revival Poetry Journal, The Stony Thursday Book, The Poetry Bus, Irish Left Review and in translation in Cuadrivio Magazine (Mexico). She was the runner up in the North Beach Nights Grand Slam Series 2010 and was the winner of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature Grand Slam 2011. She has read her work widely at events such as Cúirt and as a featured reader at the Over the Edge reading series in Galway, the Temple House Festival, Testify, Electric Picnic, O Bheal and at the Irish Writers’ Centre, she was an invited guest at the 2011 Vilenica Festival of Literature in Slovenia and in Spring 2012 her poem "I Crept Out" received second prize in the Ballymaloe International Poetry Competition.
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Ellen Nic Thomás is a bilingual poet from Dublin. She graduated from Trinity College with a BA in English and Irish. Her work has been published by headstuff.org, Tales From the Forest and The Attic. “Beochaoineadh Máthar Maoise”and other poems by Ellen Nic Thomás |
The writer Máire Dinny Wren is from Gaoth Dobhair in Co. Donegal. She writes poetry and short stories. Coiscéim published her first collection of poetry, Ó Bhile go Bile, in 2011. Éabhlóid published her collection of short stories, Go mbeinnse choíche saor, in 2016 and Éabhlóid also published her second poetry collection, Tine Ghealáin in 2019. Her work has been published in Duillí Éireann, Comhar, an tUltach, Feasta, The Bramley, Strokestown Poetry Anthology 3 and four of her stories were published by Éabhlóid in the short story collection, Go dtí an lá bán in 2012. Máire has won many literary prizes over the years, including, comórtas filíochta Focail Aniar Aduaidh in 2017 for her poem ‘An Fidléir’. In 2016 she won the Gael Linn poetry competition Ó Pheann na nGael. She won Comórtas Filíochta Uí Néill in 2011 and one of her poems was on the short list for Duais de hÍde in 2019. She was the winner of duais Fhoras na Gaeilge ag Listowel Writers’ Week in 2010 with her short story ‘Ag Téarnamh chun Baile’. A radio adaption of her short story ‘Thar an Tairseach’ was broadcast by Drama on One, RTÉ radio and was shortlisted for Prix Europa 2013. |
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Ceathrúintí Mháire Ní Ógáin’ and ‘A fhir dar fhulaingeas’ by Máire Mhac an tSaoi |
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Siobhan's website |
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Ann Leahy’s first collection, The Woman who Lived her Life Backwards (Arlen House, 2008), won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Individual poems have twice been commended in the British National Poetry Competition and have also won or been placed in many competitions. Most recently, a new poem came second in the Yeovil Literary Prize, 2019, another was a prize-winner in the Troubadour International Prize, 2018. Poems have been widely published in Irish and British journals (including The North, Poetry Ireland Review, Stand, AGENDA, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Cyphers) and have been included in several anthologies. She used to work as a lawyer and now works as a policy analyst and researcher. She recently returned to writing poetry after taken a break from it while completing a PhD on ageing and disability. She grew up in Borrisoleigh, Co. Tipperary, and lives in Dublin. |
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The River was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, given for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place. In 2016 Jane won the Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry and the inaugural Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year Award. She was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Literary Bursary in 2017. Jane holds a BA in English & Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin, an MPhil in Writing from the University of South Wales, and has a background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. She grew up on a farm in Roscommon and now lives with her partner in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow, where she combines writing with her work as a creative writing tutor and group facilitator.
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[ Image: Malachi O'Doherty Maureen Boyle lives in Belfast. She began writing as a child in Sion Mills, County Tyrone, winning a UNESCO medal for a book of poems in 1979 at eighteen. She studied English and History in Trinity in Dublin and did postgraduate work in UEA and UU. In 2005 she was awarded the Master’s in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. She has won various awards including the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize in 2007; the Strokestown International Poetry Prize in the same year and in 2013 she won the Fish Short Memoir Prize. She has received support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in the form of Individual Arts, Aces and Travel Awards. In 2008 she was commissioned to write a poem on the Crown Bar in Belfast for a BBC documentary and some of her work has been translated into German. In 2017 she was awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry’s Inaugural Travel Bursary for work on Anne More, the wife of John Donne. In November 2018 her poem, The Nunwell Letter, was runner-up in the Coast-to-Coast Single Poet Competition for a stitched limited edition, by artist Maria Izakova-Bennett in Liverpool. In January 2019 a long poem on Strabane will be broadcast on Radio 4 in Conversations on a Bench. Her debut collection, The Work of a Winter was published by Arlen House Press, Dublin and has just come out as a second edition. She taught Creative Writing with the Open University for ten years and teaches English in St Dominic’s Grammar School in Belfast. Lilacs From the Field Of Mars and other poems by Maureen Boyle |
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Roberta Beary identifies as gender-expansive and writes to connect with the disenfranchised, to let them know they are not alone. She is the author of Deflection (Accents, 2015), nothing left to say (King’s Road Press, 2009) and The Unworn Necklace (Snapshot Press, 2007, 5th ed. 2017) which was a finalist in the Poetry Society of America annual book awards. Beary is the editor of the haiku anthologies Wishbone Moon (Jacar Press, 2018), fresh paint (Red Moon Press, 2014), 7 (Jacar Press, 2013), dandelion clocks (HSA, 2008) and fish in love (HSA, 2006). Her work appears in Rattle, KYSO Flash, Cultural Weekly, 100 Word Story, and Haiku In English The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013). Beary’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net and multiple Pushcart Prizes. She lives in County Mayo, Ireland where she edits haibun for the journal Modern Haiku. |
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Eva O'Connor is a writer and performer from Ogonnelloe, Co.Clare She has written for stage, screen and radio. Her plays include My Name is Saoirse, Overshadowed , Maz and Bricks, and MUSTARD (winner of Fringe First Award 2019). Her short story Midnight Sandwich was aired on BBC Radio 4. |
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Clodagh Mooney Duggan is an emerging poet. She originally trained as an actor, graduating from The Gaiety School of Acting in 2013. Since then, she has begun writing for the stage and is currently writing Made from Paper, which will be premiere in Dublin 2020 in The Scene and Heard Festival. The Women Who Loved Me & The Women Who Couldn’t will be her first published collection. |
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Deirdre Gallagher is a teacher and writer with works published in A New Ulster, Crossways Literary Magazine, Poethead, Comhar, and Feasta. She recognizes the importance of gender perspective and equality, and values the role emotional literacy has to play in our evolving world. A language enthusiast, she believes that we can dispel the shadows cast by checkered history, disconnection and poor self-image to see the emergence of a bright, compassionate and equitable future which celebrates and benefits from the immense advantages of multilingualism. |
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CLICK HERE to receive notifications of readings, workshops and other poetry events. |
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Rosalin Blue is a cultural scientist, translator, and poet who began performing in 1995 in Hildesheim, Germany. Linked to the literary scene in Ireland since 2000, her poetic home is O Bhéal in Cork. She has performed in Cork City and County, Limerick, Galway, and Dublin, and at festivals like the Electric Picnic and the LINGO Spoken Word Festival. Blue’s poems have been published in Southword and the Five Words Volumes in Cork, Revival Poetry, Stanzas in Limerick, and in Crannóg Magazine, Galway. She has been included in two Cork Anthologies, On the Banks (2016) and A Journey Called Home (2018). Her poetry collection In the Consciousness of Earth was published by Lapwing, Belfast in 2012, and her translation of love-poetry by the German Expressionist August Stramm You. Lovepoems & Posthumous Love Poems came out in 2015. |
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Jane Burn's poems have appeared in many magazines, such as Butcher’s Dog, The Interpreter’s House, Obsessed With Pipework, The Curlew, The Fenland Reed, Strix, Under the Radar, Bare Fiction, The Rialto, Prole, Long Poem Magazine, Elsewhere, Crannog, Domestic Cherry, Iota Poetry, The Poet’s Republic, Eye Flash Poetry, Finished Creatures and the Oxford English Journal. Her poems have also been published in anthologies from The Emma Press and Seren. Her poems are regularly placed in competitions and she has been nominated for both The Pushcart and the Forward Prize. |
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Breda Spaight is a poet and novelist from Ireland. Her poems are published widely in Ireland and abroad, including The SHOp, Burning Bush 2, Banshee, Orbis, Envoi, Atticus Review (US), Communion (AUS),The Ofi Press, and others. She is the 2016 winner of the Boyle Arts Festival Poetry Competition, and runner up in the iYeats International Poetry Prize. |
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Susan Kelly is from Westport, Co Mayo. Her work has appeared in Cyphers, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stony Thursday Book, Crannóg, Revival, Abridged, The London Magazine, Boyne Berries, The Weary Blues, Burning Bush 2, wordlegs.com and was short-listed for the Writing Spirit Award 2010. She was a featured reader at Over the Edge in Galway 2011, shortlisted for the New Writer of the Year 2013 and longlisted for the 2014 WOW award. |
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Image Faber[/caption]
Dorothy Molloy (1942-2004) was born in Ballina, Co. Mayo in 1942. She studied languages at University College Dublin, after which she went to live in Madrid and Barcelona. During her time in Spain, she worked as a researcher, as a journalist, and as an arts administrator. She also had considerable success as a painter, winning several prizes and exhibiting widely. After her return to Ireland in 1979, she continued painting but also began writing poetry. her first book of poems Hare Soup was published in 2004 (Faber and Faber). The Poems of Dorothy Molloy will be launched in November 2019. More information at Faber. |
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Eithne’s first poetry collection Earth Music was published by Turas Press in April 2019. |
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Originally from the village of Eglinton in Derry, Gillian Hamill has lived in Dublin for the past 12 years (intermingled with stints in Galway, Waterford and Nice). She has a BA in English Studies from Trinity College, Dublin and a MA in Journalism from NUI Galway. She is currently the editor of trade publication, ShelfLife magazine and has acted in a number of theatre productions. Gillian started writing poetry in late 2014.
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Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a novelist, poet and short fiction writer. She was born in Dublin in 1970 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, Dublin City University and NUI Galway. Her first full poetry collection Molly’s Daughter appeared in the ¡DIVAS! Anthology New Irish Women’s Writing (Arlen House). Her bilingual poetry collection Tattoo:Tatú (Arlen House, 2007) was shortlisted for the 2008 Rupert and Eithne Strong Award. A pamphlet Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car (Templar, 2009) was one of four winners of the 2009 Templar Poetry Pamphlet competition. Nuala’s début novel You (New Island, 2010) was called ‘a heart-warmer’ by The Irish Times and ‘a gem’ by The Irish Examiner. Her third short story collection Nude (Salt, 2009) was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize.
Nuala teaches creative writing part-time and has won many literary prizes, including RTÉ Radio’s Francis MacManus Award, the inaugural Cúirt New Writing Prize, the inaugural Jonathan Swift Award and the Cecil Day Lewis Award. She has twice been nominated for a Hennessy Award, and was awarded Arts Council Bursaries in Literature in 2004 and 2009.
Her poetry and fiction have been published and anthologised in Ireland, the UK, France, Canada, Australia and the USA; and have been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 and Lyric FM. Her residencies have included a poetry writing project with long-term elderly residents in Merlin Park Hospital, Galway, and Writer-in-Residence at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature. Nuala lives in County Galway with her husband and three children. (Salmon)
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For more information visit aliceekinsella.com or Facebook.com/AliceEKinsella |
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Mary O’Connell has had poems published in Southword, Best of Irish Poetry 2008, and the Café Review, (Portland ME). She taught languages and English and now lives in Cork city. She also had some success reciting her work in Strokestown and Derry. She has been fortunate to have been mentored by Paddy Galvin and Greg O’Donoghue in a workshop at the Munster Literature Centre, and often writes about nature and classical mythology, as well as taking an ironic look at public figures and events. A regular at O Bhéal, she has twice been asked to read for visiting American students.
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Trish Bennett hails from County Leitrim. She’s got the breeze of Thur (the mountain, not the God) in her blood. She crossed the border to study over twenty years ago and was charmed into staying by a Belfast biker. They have settled themselves into a small cabin near the lakeshore in Fermanagh, and try to keep the noise down in their bee-loud glade. Bennett writes about the shenanigans of her family and other creatures. Sometimes she rants. She was a finalist in seven poetry competitions in the past two years, including North West Words, The Percy French, Bailieborough, and The Bangor Literary Journal, and has won The Leitrim Guardian Literary Award for poetry twice. Bennett is a Professional Member of the Irish Writers Centre.
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Bernadette Gallagher, one of eight children, was born by the seaside in Donegal in 1959 and now lives on a hillside in County Cork. At 22 years of age she accepted an offer of a job in Baghdad where she lived and worked for two years. Ever since she has had a special affinity with the people of the Middle East. While working full-time Bernadette studied for a B.Sc. in Information Technology and an M.Sc. in Internet Systems and continues to work full time now as a project manager.She has been writing a personal journal for many years and her poetry has been published in print in Boyne Berries, Ropes 2016 and Stanzas, and online at HeadStuff.org, Picaroon Poetry and The Incubator Journal. On most Monday evenings Bernadette reads at the Open Mic during the Ó Bhéal Weekly Poetry event in Cork. |
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Deirdre Daly is a writer living in Dublin, Ireland. Her poetry has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Magma, Banshee, The Penny Dreadful and The Irish Times amongst others. She was nominated for a Hennessy New Irish Writing award and received a special commendation in the Patrick Kavanagh poetry award in 2017. |
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Emma Gleeson lives in Dublin. Her writing adventures include poems, cultural reviews, and essays. She has worked in the theatre industry as a costume designer and events coordinator, and lectures on sustainability. She has a BA in Drama & Theatre and an MA in Fashion History. Instagram: @emmajgleeson |
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Gaynor is a member of Holywood Writers’ Group, The Irish Writers Centre and Women Aloud NI. She also volunteers for EastSide Arts during their summer festival and the CS Lewis festival in November. Gaynor is a keen amateur photographer and has had some of her photography published in journals and anthologies, also.
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'Aleph to Taf' and other poems are © Emma McKervey |
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Author image © Anna Murray Christine Murray is a poet and web developer. She developed Poethead; a poetry blog in 2008. She graduated in Art History and English Literature at UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy. She qualified and has worked as a city and guilds conservation stone cutter with the Office of Public Works/Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland. Her restoration stone work is largely architectural, she worked in Counties Limerick and Kerry, and was based at Ross Castle at Loch Lein (Killarney, Co. Kerry) and in Ardfert Cathedral among other places. She is primarily a page poet but has written poetry for vocal performance. Her ‘Lament for Three Women’s Voices‘ was performed at The Béal Festival of New Music and Poetry (Smock Alley Theatre, 2012). She is currently archiving materials related to Fired! Irish Women poets at RASCAL (QUB) Her chapbook Three Red Things was published by Smithereens Press (2013). A small collection of interrelated poems in series and sequence Cycles was published by Lapwing Press (2013). A book-length poem The Blind was published by Oneiros Books (2013). Her second book-length poem She published by Oneiros Books (2014). A chapbook Signature published by Bone Orchard Press (2014). Her work is included in, And Agamemnon Dead; an alternative collection of Irish poetry.(Eds, Peter O’Neill and Walter Ruhlmann, 2015).“A Modern Encounter with ‘Foebus abierat’: On Eavan Boland’s “Phoebus Was Gone, all Gone, His Journey Over” in Eavan Boland: Inside History (published Arlen House, Eds, Nessa O’Mahony and Siobhán Campbell, 2016). All The Worlds Between, (Anthology, eds, Srilata Krishnan and Fióna Bolger, Yoda Publishing, 2017), The Gladstone Readings, (Anthology, Ed. Peter O’Neill, Famous Seamus Publishing, 2017). Her third chapbook A Hierarchy Of Halls was published in February 2018 (Smithereens Press). Bind was published in October 2018 (Turas Press). Gold Friend is forthcoming in late 2020 (Turas Press). § Recours au Poème: Poésies & Mondes Poétiques
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Patricia Walsh was born in Mourneabbey, Co Cork, Ireland, and was educated in University College Cork, graduating with an MA in Archaeology in 2000. Previously she has published one collection of poetry, titled Continuity Errors (Lapwing Press 2010) Her poetry is published in The Fractured Nuance; Revival Magazine; Ink Sweat and Tears; Drunk Monkeys; Hesterglock Press; Linnet’s Wing, Narrator International, and The Evening Echo, a local Cork newspaper with a wide circulation. She was the featured artist for June 2015 in the Rain Party Disaster Journal. In addition, She has also published a novel, titled The Quest for Lost Eire, in 2014. |
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Marie Hanna Curran holds an Honours Degree in Equine Science and is qualified as an Accounting Technician. However, her time is now spent farming words as she refuses to allow illness – Myalgic Encephalomyelitis – impact her quest to fill the world with words. Her articles have appeared in the Galway Independent, Connacht Tribune and Irish Independent and her regular column sits between the pages of the magazine Athenry News and Views. Along with freelance writing, her poems and short stories have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies across the globe and her solo collection of poetry Observant Observings were published by Tayen Lane Publishing in 2014. |
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Anamaría Crowe Serrano is a poet and translator born in Ireland to an Irish father and a Spanish mother. She grew up bilingually, straddling cultures, rarely with her nose out of a book. Languages have always fascinated her to the extent that she has never stopped learning or improving her knowledge of them. She enjoys cross-cultural and cross-genre exchanges with artists and poets. Much of her work is the result of such collaborations. With a B.A. (Hons) in Spanish and French from Trinity College Dublin, Anamaría went on to do an M.A. in Translation Studies at Dublin City University. Since then, she has worked in localization (translating hardware and software from English to Spanish), has been a reader for the blind, and occasionally teaches Spanish. For over 15 years she has translated poetry from Spanish and Italian to English. Anamaría is the recipient of two awards from the Arts Council of Ireland to further her writing. Her translations have won many prizes abroad and her own poetry has been anthologised in Census (Seven Towers), Landing Places (Dedalus), Pomeriggio (Leconte) and other publications. She is currently translations editor for Colony Journal
Jezebel |
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Lorraine Carey from Donegal, now lives in Co. Kerry. Her work has been published in the following journals; The Honest Ulsterman, A New Ulster, Proletarian, Stanzas Limerick, Quail Bell, The Galway Review, Vine Leaves, Poetry Breakfast, Olentangy Review and Live Encounters. Her first collection of poetry will be published this summer.
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Her poetry has been widely broadcast, translated and anthologised including in, The Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, USA (2010), The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women Poets, USA (2011), Femmes d'Irlande en Poésie, 1973-2013, ed Clíona Ní Ríordáin, Lines of Vision, The National Gallery of Ireland, 2014. She holds a B.Ed with a distinction in English Literature, was the recipient of an M.A in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, was the inaugural winner of the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize and has received many Arts Council Literature Bursaries for her writing. In 2014 she was the recipient of a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for her poetry. In recent years she has been Poet- at -Work in the Coombe Maternity Hospital, Dublin and Writer in Residence at The Marino Institute of Education, Dublin. Enda Wyley’s books for children from O'Brien Press are Boo and Bear and The Silver Notebook. Her book I Won’t Go to China ! was awarded a Reading Association of Ireland Special Merit Award 2011. Enda Wyley was elected to Aosdána in March 2015. Enda Wyley Reviews ‘New and Selected’ seems the perfectly suited appellation for the work on offer here. Ms. Wyley’s poems are perpetually fresh, utterly scrutinized, marked by vigor and virtuosity, arriving on the page as accomplished things, like settled law, fit for the long haul language calls us to.’ Thomas Lynch, Poet, 2014. ‘Enda Wyley’s poems are remarkable for the way they communicate warm feeling through their lightness of touch and clarity of colour.’ 'Enda Wyley is a true poet. To Wake To This articulates a subtle, dreamy apprehension through diction and imagery all the writer’s own.' ‘Her imagery, honesty and insight make this a first-rate work.’
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Jennifer Matthews writes poetry and is editor of the Long Story, Short Journal. Originally from Missouri, USA she has been living in Ireland for over a decade, and is a citizen of both countries. Her poetry has been published in, or is forthcoming from Banshee, Poetry International — Ireland, The Stinging Fly, Mslexia, The Pickled Body, Burning Bush 2, Abridged, Revival, Necessary Fiction, Poetry Salzburg, Foma & Fontanelles, and Cork Literary Review, and anthologised in Dedalus’s collection of immigrant poetry in Ireland, Landing Places (2010). In 2015 she was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. A chapbook of her poetry, Rootless, is available to read free online at Smithereens Press. Rootless by Jennifer Matthews (Smithereens Press 2015) |
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"My greatest regret throughout the process has been how little credit she gives herself, for example she does not mention a paper she gave in the Royal Irish Academy in 1916 or her contribution to the article on dyes in Encyclopedia Britannica or her volume of poetry, Magnificat, or contributing to the Book of St Ultan, or being a founder member of Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe (the masks of Tragedy and Comedy she made for the Gate theatre are now on a wall in the Taibhdhearc) and the Galway Art Club, where she exhibited for years, or making costumes for Micheál Mac Liammóir in 1928, or being responsible for Oisín Kelly deciding to become a sculptor – he was one of very many who said that she enabled them to do the right thing for their own fulfillment. When she wrote it was in order to provide a history of her times and an insight into what made her family so strange. Like many of her generation she did not write much about her own feelings and her humourous and optimistic nature does not really come through in her writing. I would like to have been able to put that in but could not in all faith do so. “ It is also worth noting that Joe ( Joseph Mary Plunkett) named her as literary executor, and she edited his Collected Poems in 1916.
100 Irish Women Poets at Elliptical Movements
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Photo by Alistair Livingstone
Csilla Toldy was born in Budapest. After a long odyssey in Europe she entered the UK with a writer’s visa to work on films and ended up living in Northern Ireland in 1998. Her prose appeared in Southword, Black Mountain Review and anthology, Fortnight, The Incubator Journal, Strictly Writing and Cutalongstory. Her poetry was published online and in print literary magazines, such as Snakeskin and Poetry24, Savitri, Lagan Online, Headstuff, Visible Verse, A New Ulster and in two chapbooks published by Lapwing Belfast: Red Roots – Orange Sky and The Emigrant Woman’s Tale. Csilla makes videopoems, available on her website: www.csillatoldy.co.uk & https://soundcloud.com/ctoldy |
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Shortlisted Vallum Poetry Award (Montreal) 2012. Poem for Patience 2015, 2016 and 2017. |
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Rita Ann Higgins’s readings are legendary. Raucous, anarchic, witty and sympathetic, her poems chronicle the lives of the Irish dispossessed in ways that are both provocative and heart-warming. Her next collection Tongulish was published in April 2016 by Bloodaxe. |
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She’s taken part in The Big Renga, a month-long collaborative poem, and was interviewed by Sara Cox on BBC Radio 2 about this. She is a Scottish Poetry Library Ambassador, a member of the Federation of Writers (Scotland), has been interviewed by children and parents in Dubai at a poetry workshop there, helps with the social media for the cross-community group Women Aloud NI, is part of the FreshAyr initiative and their poetry events, and she runs The Moving On Poetry Group weekly in Kilmarnock. |
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Barbara Smith lives in County Louth, Ireland. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast. Her achievements include being shortlisted for the UK Smith/Doorstop Poetry Pamphlet competition 2009, a prize-winner at Scotland’s 2009 Wigtown Poetry Competition, and recipient of the Annie Deeny 2009/10 bursary awarded by the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for Artists and Writers, Ireland. Her first collection, Kairos, was published by Doghouse Books in 2007 and a second followed in 2012, The Angels’ Share. She is a frequent reader with The Poetry Divas, a collective that read at festivals such as Electric Picnic. |
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Jessica Traynor is from Dublin. Her first collection, Liffey Swim, was published by Dedalus Press in 2014. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, The Raving Beauties Anthology (Bloodaxe), Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History, If Ever You Go (2014 Dublin One City One Book), The Irish Times, Peloton (Templar Poetry), New Planet Cabaret (New Island Books), The Pickled Body, Burning Bush II, Southword, The SHOp, Wordlegs, The Moth, Poetry 24, The Stinging Fly, and New Irish Writing among others. She is the 2014 recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary. She was named Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year in 2013 and was highly commended at the 2013 Patrick Kavanagh Award. She won the 2011 Single Poem Competition at Listowel Writer’s Week. She received a Literature Bursary from Dublin City Council in 2010 and in was part of the 2009 Poetry Ireland Introduction Series. Jessica works as Literary Reader for the Abbey Theatre and teaches creative writing courses through Big Smoke Writing Factory and the Irish Writers Centre. She also works as a freelance dramaturg. |
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"Whistleblower" and other poems by Nicki Griffin
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She occasionally retweets other peoples’ interesting posts at @joburnspoems |
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Publications: Agenda; Tridae (in translation to Spanish); Poetry NZ; Skylight47, Crannog, Ropes, The Stinging Fly, Abridged, New Irish Writing, North West Words; Stony Thursday Book, anthology Balancing Act, The First Cut, Shot Glass Journal, The Galway Review; and book Yeats150. |
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“Elaine Feeney is the freshest, most engaging and certainly the most provocative female poet to come out of Ireland in the last decade. Her poem ” Mass”, is both gloriously funny, bitter-sweet in the astuteness of its observations and a brilliant, sly window into the Irish female Catholic experience. Her use of irony is delicious. Her comments on the human condition, which run throughout her lines, are in the tradition of Dean Swift and she rightfully takes her place alongside Eavan Boland and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill as a very, very important Irish voice.” Fionnuala Flanagan, California 2013 (Praise for The Radio was Gospel, 2013, Salmon) “A choice collection of poetry, one not to be overlooked, 5 Stars” Midwest Book Review, USA, (Praise for Where’s Katie? 2010, Salmon Poetry). |
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Sarah O’Connor is originally from Tipperary. She studied in UCC and Boston College, and she now lives in Dublin. She previously worked in publishing and now works in politics. She is working on her first novel and on a collection of poetry. She has been published by Wordlegs and The Weary Blues. Sarah O’Connor blogs at The Ghost Station & tweets at @theghoststation |
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Some of her poetry can be found at poetry4on.blogspot.com |
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Anna Walsh at The HU |
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Some of her poems are available in online archives, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Troubles Archive and the Poetry Ireland archive. Some have been exhibited in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast and Derry’s Central Library. One was made into a sculpture and is on permanent display in Down Arts Centre, Downpatrick. She has had poems in anthologies – The Stony Thursday Book, Aesthetica Creative Writing, Washing Windows, On the Grass When I Arrive, Something About Home – in magazines such as Abridged, Poetry Ireland, The Dickens, Mslexia, Irish Feminist Review, Boyne Berries, Skylight 47, Crannog, Banshee, Acumen, North West Words, Ulla’s Nib, Fortnight, the South Bank Magazine, and also online, in Four X Four and on a website for psychotherapists. She has won the Down Arts, Mourne Observer and Segora poetry prizes and has been listed in competitions.
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She has published four collections of poems in Irish, An Dealg Droighin (1981), Féar Suaithinseach (1984), Feis(1991) and Cead Aighnis (1998). From The Gallery Press. |
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She is a featured poet in the winter 2017 New Hibernia Review, University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. She won the 2016 UK Bare Fiction Flash Fiction competition. Eleanor holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin, an MA in Cultural History (Hons) University of Northumbria, a BA (Hons 1st), Open University. She is Programme Curator for Dromineer Literary Festival. She is helm and Press Officer for Lough Derg RNLI Lifeboat. She began her career as a nurse and midwife. |
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www.kerrieobrien.com |
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The Hare Arch by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne |
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Maria Wallace (Maria Teresa Mir Ros) was born in Catalonia, but lived her teenage years in Chile. She later came to Ireland where she has now settled. She has a BA in English and Spanish Literature, 2004, an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature, 2005. She won the Hennessy Literary Awards, Poetry Section, 2006. Her work has been published widely in Ireland, England, Italy, Australia and Catalonia. Winner of The Scottish International Poetry Competition, The Oliver Goldsmith Competition, Cecil Day Lewis Awards, Moore Literary Convention, Cavan Crystal Awards, William Allingham Festival. She participated in the ISLA Festival (Ireland, Spain and Latin America), 2015, and has published Second Shadow, 2010, and The blue of distance, 2014, two bilingual collections (English - Catalan), a third one to come out within the year. She has taught Spanish, French, Art and Creative Writing. She facilitates Virginia House Creative Writers a group she founded in 1996, and has edited three volumes of their work.
Moving Like Anemones and Other Poems by Lorna Shaughnessy
Self Portrait as a She Wolf and other poems by Breda Wall Ryan |
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The Poet O’Kane
Website: A Dreaming Skin
Mary Noonan lives in Cork. Her poems have been published in The Dark Horse, The North, Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Threepenny Review, Cyphers, The Stinging Fly, Wasafiri and Best of Irish Poetry 2010. She won the Listowel Poetry Collection Prize in 2010. Her first collection – The Fado House (Dedalus Press, 2012) – was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for a First Collection (2013) and the Strong/Shine Award (2013).
Sarah Clancy has been shortlisted for several poetry prizes including the Listowel Collection of Poetry Competition and the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Her first book of poetry, Stacey and the Mechanical Bull, was published by Lapwing Press Belfast in December 2010 and a further selection of her work was published in June 2011 by Doire Press. Her poems have been published in Revival Poetry Journal, The Stony Thursday Book, The Poetry Bus, Irish Left Review and in translation in Cuadrivio Magazine (Mexico). She was the runner up in the North Beach Nights Grand Slam Series 2010 and was the winner of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature Grand Slam 2011. She has read her work widely at events such as Cúirt and as a featured reader at the Over the Edge reading series in Galway, the Temple House Festival, Testify, Electric Picnic, O Bheal and at the Irish Writers’ Centre, she was an invited guest at the 2011 Vilenica Festival of Literature in Slovenia and in Spring 2012 her poem "I Crept Out" received second prize in the Ballymaloe International Poetry Competition.
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An Index of Women Poets (2008-2020) by Christine Elizabeth Murray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. |
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An Index of Women Poets (2008-2020) by Christine Elizabeth Murray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. |
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Chris Murray is a graduate of Art History and English Literature at UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy. She qualified and worked as a conservation stone cutter with the Office of Public Works/Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland, in Counties Limerick and Kerry. She was primarily based at Ross Castle (Loch Lein, Killarney, Co. Kerry) and at Ardfert Cathedral among other places. Although Chris is primarily a page poet she has written poetry for vocal performance. Her "Lament for Three Women's Voices" was performed at The Béal Festival of New Music and Poetry (Smock Alley Theatre, 2012) and "Nocturne for Voices One and Two" will be produced as a sound piece by Una Lee in 2021.
Chris Murray's Turas Press profile is here. Her most recent book publications include A Hierarchy of A Halls (Smithereens Press) and bind (Turas Press) both 2018. Her new collection Gold Friend was published in September 2020 by Turas Press.
Chris curates the Fired! archive at RASCAL (Research And Special Collections Available Locally at QUB). Fired! Irish Women Poets Archive at RASCAL.
The below preamble and poems are excerpted from the Lares Series, composed between April 2020 and November 2020. The entire series can be read (and downloaded) Via Indelible Literary Journal. ‘Lares’ is dedicated in gratitude to Eavan Boland (1944-2020). The series derives from my current MSS in progress.
My most grateful thanks to Roula-Maria Dib and the board of Indelible for accepting the work.
Published 12/01/2021
Preamble Break the glass that shields morning's flame. Proceed from your room— IV. Soft, the softening rain Sing to pierce the breast — sing to pierce the breast, nighthooks brim to split. Sing to pierce the night— sing to pierce the night -hooks brim to split. Dawn’s contraction, slow the opening— orchid-white a Yellow toned-song to loosen the gum that holds peony’s ample heart. V. Lares Pause – I am night (dark) afraid. Begin now. Begun, My mourning for what was– (not) slaked by light’s coming. The Lares of my house is twice-lit: dawn’s advent, night’s candle. © Chris Murray 2021 Published Indelible Literary Journal Issue IV, Escapism.
Related links The Lares series: “Lares” series, by Christine Murray – Indelible Online URL for Indelible (AUD): Indelible – "Books. Cats. Life is Good." Download link: Indelible_Issue_4.pdf(Review)- Adobe Document Cloud 'red rose world' & 'addendum to': Poems by Christine Murray – Indelible
Contact Chris at c(dot)elizabethmurray(at)gmail(dot)com
A small collection of interrelated poems in series and sequence Cycles was published by Lapwing Press (2013). A book-length poem The Blind was published by Oneiros Books (2013). Her second book-length poem She published by Oneiros Books (2014). And Agamemnon Dead; an alternative collection of Irish poetry edited by Peter O’Neill and Walter Ruhlmann (2015). "A Modern Encounter with 'Foebus abierat', on Eavan Boland's "Phoebus Was Gone, all Gone, His Journey Over" for Eavan Boland: Inside History, published by Arlen House and edited by Nessa O'Mahony and Siobhán Campbell (2016). All The Worlds Between, Anthology, eds Srilata Krishnan and Fióna Bolger (Yoda Publishing, 2017), The Gladstone Readings, Anthology, Ed. Peter O'Neill (Famous Seamus Publishing, 2017). bind was published in October 2018. Gold Friend was published in September 2020 by Turas Press.
Her chapbook Three Red Things was published by Smithereens Press (2013). A chapbook Signature published by Bone Orchard Press (2014). A Hierarchy of Halls was published by Smithereens Press in 2018.
Her poetry has been collected in And Agamemnon Dead; an alternative collection of Irish poetry. edited by Peter O'Neill and Walter Ruhlmann (2015). Tiny Moments; An Anthology (2016) Edited by David Pring-Mill. Blackjack; A Contemporary Volume of Irish Poetry (2016) published by Singur Publishing, Romania. A Transitory House; a suite of poems (2016) first performed at Ó Bheal (Co. Cork, Ireland) and based on Freda Laughton’s Now I am a Tower of Darkness published by Limerick Writer's Centre in 1916 – 2016: An Anthology of Reactions (Edited by John Liddy & Dominic Taylor) All The Worlds Between, Anthology, eds Srilata Krishnan and Fióna Bolger (Yoda Publishing, 2017), The Gladstone Readings Anthology, Ed. Peter O'Neill (Famous Seamus Publishing, 2017)
Her individual, series, small group poems, and a review have been published in The Southword Literary Journal, Crannóg Magazine, Skylight 47, Bone Orchard Poetry, One (Jacar Press), The Burning Bush II, Poetry Bus Magazine, Post II (Mater Dei Institute) (Ireland). A New Ulster Magazine and The Honest Ulsterman (Northern Ireland). York Literary Review (U.K). Caper Literary Journal, Compose Journal and Ditch Poetry (US). Her translated work appears in Levure Littéraire Magazine (Germany & International), Recours au Poème Magazine (France), Şiirden Magazine ("Of Art", Turkey), Revisita Itaka (Romania), and Indelible Literary Journal (Dubai, UAE). American women's magazines When Women Waken Journal and WomenArts Quarterly Journal have published small series and single poems from her published collections.
This is an excerpt from a reflection on Gold Friend published online in the Irish Times (16/09/2020). Thanks very much to Martin Doyle who offered me the space to write about the book and about Poethead.
…The convergence of influence and imagery that is inherent in Gold Friend began at Drimnagh Castle and works from there into other places and into other books too. The gold friend is both a literary device and an absent person who acts as a passive receptor of knowledge. The gold friend is disembodied, and cannot access the sensory world, or experience it as we do,
Periphery
Be near enough to the periphery
to discern the wing-settle-sounds
small birds make in thickets,
their halls –
Near enough for red to insist
that you regard it as haw,
rose-leavings
Know, bird-panic sounds
differently to wing-settle’s
soft-rest after the flurry of
flight,
– they say
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bav1bDu94AQ]
More here
07/09/2020 Elegy and Displacement in ‘Gold Friend’ – at Writing.ie
The title of my book is Gold Friend. The phrase or image associated with it is derived from an Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer which is rooted in elegy and in personal displacement. These are the themes of the book, which I will allude to a bit later on in this short essay.
Gold Friend began, as my books do, from a collection of small themed notebooks. In this case, it originally comprised five small books that were loosely thematically related according to how I compose or create the poem image
Read more here
Fill Your Books (June 2020)
(...) Eavan Boland: Inside History which I contributed to. I wrote the chapter “A Modern Encounter With Foebus Abierat” - based on Eavan Boland’s translation of “Phoebus was gone, all gone, his journey over” which I felt encapsulated Eavan Boland’s ideas as a woman and a poet. The kernel of the translation is of female transgression against the established order. Eavan asked to meet me and was delighted with the essay. I think meeting her meant so much to me as a poet and we remained in touch over the last four years of her life, through committee work, or meetings, or emails. She picked me up after a bad burn-out and I am very grateful to have known her. We need to talk about her interventions in the areas of equality and diversity. I am linking the poem here.
Le Ortique (of the deformed canon) June 2020
The Irish literary canon is a failure, it omits, it cannot withstand interrogation and its base is sexist. I stopped listening years ago and made my own spaces, I encourage others to do the same. (Read more here)
On The Seawall (June 2020)
I had read Emilia Philips’ poem “Scar” on the Academy Of American Poets website and had seen some tweets about writing trauma at a time of great preoccupation with my own surgical recovery. A prolonged process. There are ten active folders on my desktop. Four of these are image folders containing artwork that revives and enlivens me. Four of the folders are manuscripts, in proofs, unfinished, or just begun. One of these manuscripts now consists of 13 pages. The last folder, the one that hides amid this great hope, these works in progress, is the scar folder. (Read more here)
Live Encounters (March 2020)
Thriving Outside of the Narrative, an essay on poetic practice
The individual poet navigates the personal within their own language-ecology, be their art textual or performative. Poets are makers of books, and book-making is not about rushing hidebound into a narrative expectation that requires conformity in how it should be. The art of the poet and their relation to language should stand apart from narrative concerns, and be responsive alone to the interiority of the poet. However, we live in an age where it is quite easy to exert pressures on the poet to conform to linguistic and other ideologies that do not reflect their own relation to language and to their personal symbol use. The job of the academy and the vaunted book publishing industry who may, for instance, desire their eco-crisis to be delivered in short sharp dilutable doses is to follow the poet. It is not their role to impose a narrative that amounts to a concoction of ideological stances having nothing to do with the poet’s relationship to their art. (Read more here ...)
Irish Times (September 2019)
Tackling the catastrophic canonical neglect of women poets and writers
"Faced with the catastrophic canonical neglect of Irish women poets and writers in very real terms, there are many responses. Those of interrogation, of anger, of reclamation and of healing. These responses have all occurred, are continuing to occur among women writers across literary genres.
In her article, A profound deafness to the female voice (The Irish Times, April 18th, 2018), Sinéad Gleeson examines our responses as the women who have been left to reclaim our narrative heritages. Once again, it is up to women to use their time to respond, to do the corrective work of calling out male editors, and how this eats up their creative time, steering the focus away from their own work."
An Interview with Moyra Donaldson at Honest Ulsterman (Feb. 2019)
"The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2017) catalysed a lot of discussion on the canon and its absences. There was a lot of talk about how we could approach this problem, which we all believe represented another iteration of a consistent problem. Each poet or academic involved has their own take, their own story, on how the absence of women has affected their work, esteem or their sense of the appalling lack in respect for the woman poet’s voice. Mine is simple, I do not want to be part of a generation of writers that did not face this and interrogate that absence. I do not want my daughter’s generation doing the work of interrogation and asking why we, now, are too lazy or complacent or afraid to question the Irish perception of poetic authority. I am not someone who feels that it is right to walk away."
(Read more here)
Irish Times (October 2019)
"I am a poet without a landscape, a woman poet without a narrative heritage. I began tracing the huge startling landscape of US and European women’s poetry while in college. I could not find its equivalent here in Ireland. bind reflects the facts of absence and fragmentation in my poetry landscape, and the absence of women poets in our cultural narrative. bind is a book-length poem loosely divided into chapters. These chapters act as boundaries within the action of the poem and provide gateways to differing aspects of the processes inherent in bind. The title of the book takes its name from the triple hyphenation that occurs irregularly within the first chapter. bind explores movement, objects, and colours that occur in a no-place, a stasis, the fragmented landscape,"
‘I am a poet without a landscape, a woman poet without a narrative heritage’, a reflection on bind at The Irish Times
Live Encounters
Peter O'Neill on She and Cycles at Live Encounters
'In She Christine Murray takes a figure from ancient Irish mythology the Sí, as in the shee in Banshee for example, who are powerful feminine forces in pre-Christian Irish folklore, taking on the many guises. In Murray’s She they are represented by the Crow Woman, symbolised by a black feather. And it is with this singular image, of a black crow’s feather, that Murray enters the text:
Opening
A black feather
from her
black feather tree
sways down
she has spread
her blacks out
for carrion lovers
Lace their moons with trawling nets
bird-pecked crabbed and sweet apple
windfalls
roll them into grass
bamboo worms a curve into flared ground
black feather sways down
through dream
to this waking place/
of stones
(Read the full review here)
Lagan Online
About Poethead, An interview about the foundation and development of Poethead at Lagan Online
"I saw an opportunity to create a space for sharing poetry and poetry translations online some nine years ago. I did not envisage that it would be a long term project at all. I view Poethead as my site primarily, there just happen to be two indexes built into it where I have listed contemporary, translated, experimental and ‘hidden’ poetry. I rarely solicit work from poets, mostly they contact me. In some cases I have had to contact poetry editors for copyright permission. There is always quite an amount of correspondence in my email. As I only publish weekly, in as much as I can. The publication list is rolling (ongoing)."
(Read more here)
The Pan Review
"I read everything by Plath and moved on rapidly to (Anne) Sexton, Ní Dhomhnaill, Boland, Mina Loy, and H.D. I educated myself in the UCD library and from there began a lifetime of searching for a quality of voice that I felt as 'absence'. I began to read translated works also including Nagy, Sachs, Tuominen, Lorca and others. When I left college I took that sound with me. I got my degree in Art History and English, although the only thing that interested me in English was Old and Middle English."
On publishing women, cultural absence and how to change things at The Pan Review
Compose Journal
The Story Behind "bind" by Chris Murray - Compose Journal -
Narcissus & Stalk The Open Ring - Compose Journal -
Issue 61, The North
Into the Light Blown Dark; Working with Freda Laughton’s ‘Now I am a Tower of Darkness’
Freda Laughton produced one book of poetry, A Transitory House (Jonathan Cape, 1945). At the time of the book’s publication, Freda Laughton would have been thirty-eight years old. Laughton’s chosen sphere was the female intimate, and within this context she was an expressionist of some ability. Her work presaged that of Eavan Boland and of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. There is a certain fragility and darkness in Laughton’s expression which imbues it with shadow. Her art was masterful, not least in the following poem,
‘In a Transitory Beauty’,
‘Maternal the shell
Cradling the embryo bird,
A transitory house,
Fashioned for brief security,
Of purposeful fragility,
A beauty built to be broken.'
(by Freda Laughton)
Order the Magazine here.
Three Red Things (Smithereens Press, 2013)
Cycles (Lapwing Press, 2013)
*The Blind (Oneiros Books, 2013)
*She (Oneiros Books, 2014)
Signature (Bone Orchard Press, 2014)
And Agamemnon Dead; An Anthology of Early 21st Century Irish Poetry (Peter O'Neill and Walter Ruhlmann)
Eavan Boland: Inside History (Arlen house, 2016)
The Gladstone Readings Anthology (Famous Seamus, 2017)
A Hierarchy of Halls (Smithereens Press, 2018)
bind (Turas Press, 2018)
Gold Friend (Turas Press, 2020)
'small mirror' at The Honest Ulsterman
'narcissus' and 'stalk the open ring' at Compose Journal (Spring 2017)
A series from The Blind at Ditch Poetry
From Cycles at Recours au Poème
Three Red Things at Smithereens Press
Glendalough; at Iseult Gonne's Grave at Levure littéraire
Sans at The Southword Journal
Chris Murray is a graduate of Art History and English Literature at UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy. She qualified and worked as a conservation stone cutter with the Office of Public Works/Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland, in Counties Limerick and Kerry. She was primarily based at Ross Castle (Loch Lein, Killarney, Co. Kerry) and at Ardfert Cathedral among other places. Although Chris is primarily a page poet she has written poetry for vocal performance. Her "Lament for Three Women's Voices" was performed at The Béal Festival of New Music and Poetry (Smock Alley Theatre, 2012) and "Nocturne for Voices One and Two" will be produced as a sound piece by Una Lee in 2021.
Chris Murray's Turas Press profile is here. Her most recent book publications include A Hierarchy of A Halls (Smithereens Press) and bind (Turas Press) both 2018. Her new collection Gold Friend was published in September 2020 by Turas Press.
Chris curates the Fired! archive at RASCAL (Research And Special Collections Available Locally at QUB). Fired! Irish Women Poets Archive at RASCAL.
The below preamble and poems are excerpted from the Lares Series, composed between April 2020 and November 2020. The entire series can be read (and downloaded) Via Indelible Literary Journal. ‘Lares’ is dedicated in gratitude to Eavan Boland (1944-2020). The series derives from my current MSS in progress.
My most grateful thanks to Roula-Maria Dib and the board of Indelible for accepting the work.
Published 12/01/2021
Preamble Break the glass that shields morning's flame. Proceed from your room— IV. Soft, the softening rain Sing to pierce the breast — sing to pierce the breast, nighthooks brim to split. Sing to pierce the night— sing to pierce the night -hooks brim to split. Dawn’s contraction, slow the opening— orchid-white a Yellow toned-song to loosen the gum that holds peony’s ample heart. V. Lares Pause – I am night (dark) afraid. Begin now. Begun, My mourning for what was– (not) slaked by light’s coming. The Lares of my house is twice-lit: dawn’s advent, night’s candle. © Chris Murray 2021 Published Indelible Literary Journal Issue IV, Escapism.
Related links The Lares series: “Lares” series, by Christine Murray – Indelible Online URL for Indelible (AUD): Indelible – "Books. Cats. Life is Good." Download link: Indelible_Issue_4.pdf(Review)- Adobe Document Cloud 'red rose world' & 'addendum to': Poems by Christine Murray – Indelible
Contact Chris at c(dot)elizabethmurray(at)gmail(dot)com
A small collection of interrelated poems in series and sequence Cycles was published by Lapwing Press (2013). A book-length poem The Blind was published by Oneiros Books (2013). Her second book-length poem She published by Oneiros Books (2014). And Agamemnon Dead; an alternative collection of Irish poetry edited by Peter O’Neill and Walter Ruhlmann (2015). "A Modern Encounter with 'Foebus abierat', on Eavan Boland's "Phoebus Was Gone, all Gone, His Journey Over" for Eavan Boland: Inside History, published by Arlen House and edited by Nessa O'Mahony and Siobhán Campbell (2016). All The Worlds Between, Anthology, eds Srilata Krishnan and Fióna Bolger (Yoda Publishing, 2017), The Gladstone Readings, Anthology, Ed. Peter O'Neill (Famous Seamus Publishing, 2017). bind was published in October 2018. Gold Friend was published in September 2020 by Turas Press.
Her chapbook Three Red Things was published by Smithereens Press (2013). A chapbook Signature published by Bone Orchard Press (2014). A Hierarchy of Halls was published by Smithereens Press in 2018.
Her poetry has been collected in And Agamemnon Dead; an alternative collection of Irish poetry. edited by Peter O'Neill and Walter Ruhlmann (2015). Tiny Moments; An Anthology (2016) Edited by David Pring-Mill. Blackjack; A Contemporary Volume of Irish Poetry (2016) published by Singur Publishing, Romania. A Transitory House; a suite of poems (2016) first performed at Ó Bheal (Co. Cork, Ireland) and based on Freda Laughton’s Now I am a Tower of Darkness published by Limerick Writer's Centre in 1916 – 2016: An Anthology of Reactions (Edited by John Liddy & Dominic Taylor) All The Worlds Between, Anthology, eds Srilata Krishnan and Fióna Bolger (Yoda Publishing, 2017), The Gladstone Readings Anthology, Ed. Peter O'Neill (Famous Seamus Publishing, 2017)
Her individual, series, small group poems, and a review have been published in The Southword Literary Journal, Crannóg Magazine, Skylight 47, Bone Orchard Poetry, One (Jacar Press), The Burning Bush II, Poetry Bus Magazine, Post II (Mater Dei Institute) (Ireland). A New Ulster Magazine and The Honest Ulsterman (Northern Ireland). York Literary Review (U.K). Caper Literary Journal, Compose Journal and Ditch Poetry (US). Her translated work appears in Levure Littéraire Magazine (Germany & International), Recours au Poème Magazine (France), Şiirden Magazine ("Of Art", Turkey), Revisita Itaka (Romania), and Indelible Literary Journal (Dubai, UAE). American women's magazines When Women Waken Journal and WomenArts Quarterly Journal have published small series and single poems from her published collections.
This is an excerpt from a reflection on Gold Friend published online in the Irish Times (16/09/2020). Thanks very much to Martin Doyle who offered me the space to write about the book and about Poethead.
…The convergence of influence and imagery that is inherent in Gold Friend began at Drimnagh Castle and works from there into other places and into other books too. The gold friend is both a literary device and an absent person who acts as a passive receptor of knowledge. The gold friend is disembodied, and cannot access the sensory world, or experience it as we do,
Periphery
Be near enough to the periphery
to discern the wing-settle-sounds
small birds make in thickets,
their halls –
Near enough for red to insist
that you regard it as haw,
rose-leavings
Know, bird-panic sounds
differently to wing-settle’s
soft-rest after the flurry of
flight,
– they say
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bav1bDu94AQ]
More here
07/09/2020 Elegy and Displacement in ‘Gold Friend’ – at Writing.ie
The title of my book is Gold Friend. The phrase or image associated with it is derived from an Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer which is rooted in elegy and in personal displacement. These are the themes of the book, which I will allude to a bit later on in this short essay.
Gold Friend began, as my books do, from a collection of small themed notebooks. In this case, it originally comprised five small books that were loosely thematically related according to how I compose or create the poem image
Read more here
Fill Your Books (June 2020)
(...) Eavan Boland: Inside History which I contributed to. I wrote the chapter “A Modern Encounter With Foebus Abierat” - based on Eavan Boland’s translation of “Phoebus was gone, all gone, his journey over” which I felt encapsulated Eavan Boland’s ideas as a woman and a poet. The kernel of the translation is of female transgression against the established order. Eavan asked to meet me and was delighted with the essay. I think meeting her meant so much to me as a poet and we remained in touch over the last four years of her life, through committee work, or meetings, or emails. She picked me up after a bad burn-out and I am very grateful to have known her. We need to talk about her interventions in the areas of equality and diversity. I am linking the poem here.
Le Ortique (of the deformed canon) June 2020
The Irish literary canon is a failure, it omits, it cannot withstand interrogation and its base is sexist. I stopped listening years ago and made my own spaces, I encourage others to do the same. (Read more here)
On The Seawall (June 2020)
I had read Emilia Philips’ poem “Scar” on the Academy Of American Poets website and had seen some tweets about writing trauma at a time of great preoccupation with my own surgical recovery. A prolonged process. There are ten active folders on my desktop. Four of these are image folders containing artwork that revives and enlivens me. Four of the folders are manuscripts, in proofs, unfinished, or just begun. One of these manuscripts now consists of 13 pages. The last folder, the one that hides amid this great hope, these works in progress, is the scar folder. (Read more here)
Live Encounters (March 2020)
Thriving Outside of the Narrative, an essay on poetic practice
The individual poet navigates the personal within their own language-ecology, be their art textual or performative. Poets are makers of books, and book-making is not about rushing hidebound into a narrative expectation that requires conformity in how it should be. The art of the poet and their relation to language should stand apart from narrative concerns, and be responsive alone to the interiority of the poet. However, we live in an age where it is quite easy to exert pressures on the poet to conform to linguistic and other ideologies that do not reflect their own relation to language and to their personal symbol use. The job of the academy and the vaunted book publishing industry who may, for instance, desire their eco-crisis to be delivered in short sharp dilutable doses is to follow the poet. It is not their role to impose a narrative that amounts to a concoction of ideological stances having nothing to do with the poet’s relationship to their art. (Read more here ...)
Irish Times (September 2019)
Tackling the catastrophic canonical neglect of women poets and writers
"Faced with the catastrophic canonical neglect of Irish women poets and writers in very real terms, there are many responses. Those of interrogation, of anger, of reclamation and of healing. These responses have all occurred, are continuing to occur among women writers across literary genres.
In her article, A profound deafness to the female voice (The Irish Times, April 18th, 2018), Sinéad Gleeson examines our responses as the women who have been left to reclaim our narrative heritages. Once again, it is up to women to use their time to respond, to do the corrective work of calling out male editors, and how this eats up their creative time, steering the focus away from their own work."
An Interview with Moyra Donaldson at Honest Ulsterman (Feb. 2019)
"The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2017) catalysed a lot of discussion on the canon and its absences. There was a lot of talk about how we could approach this problem, which we all believe represented another iteration of a consistent problem. Each poet or academic involved has their own take, their own story, on how the absence of women has affected their work, esteem or their sense of the appalling lack in respect for the woman poet’s voice. Mine is simple, I do not want to be part of a generation of writers that did not face this and interrogate that absence. I do not want my daughter’s generation doing the work of interrogation and asking why we, now, are too lazy or complacent or afraid to question the Irish perception of poetic authority. I am not someone who feels that it is right to walk away."
(Read more here)
Irish Times (October 2019)
"I am a poet without a landscape, a woman poet without a narrative heritage. I began tracing the huge startling landscape of US and European women’s poetry while in college. I could not find its equivalent here in Ireland. bind reflects the facts of absence and fragmentation in my poetry landscape, and the absence of women poets in our cultural narrative. bind is a book-length poem loosely divided into chapters. These chapters act as boundaries within the action of the poem and provide gateways to differing aspects of the processes inherent in bind. The title of the book takes its name from the triple hyphenation that occurs irregularly within the first chapter. bind explores movement, objects, and colours that occur in a no-place, a stasis, the fragmented landscape,"
‘I am a poet without a landscape, a woman poet without a narrative heritage’, a reflection on bind at The Irish Times
Live Encounters
Peter O'Neill on She and Cycles at Live Encounters
'In She Christine Murray takes a figure from ancient Irish mythology the Sí, as in the shee in Banshee for example, who are powerful feminine forces in pre-Christian Irish folklore, taking on the many guises. In Murray’s She they are represented by the Crow Woman, symbolised by a black feather. And it is with this singular image, of a black crow’s feather, that Murray enters the text:
Opening
A black feather
from her
black feather tree
sways down
she has spread
her blacks out
for carrion lovers
Lace their moons with trawling nets
bird-pecked crabbed and sweet apple
windfalls
roll them into grass
bamboo worms a curve into flared ground
black feather sways down
through dream
to this waking place/
of stones
(Read the full review here)
Lagan Online
About Poethead, An interview about the foundation and development of Poethead at Lagan Online
"I saw an opportunity to create a space for sharing poetry and poetry translations online some nine years ago. I did not envisage that it would be a long term project at all. I view Poethead as my site primarily, there just happen to be two indexes built into it where I have listed contemporary, translated, experimental and ‘hidden’ poetry. I rarely solicit work from poets, mostly they contact me. In some cases I have had to contact poetry editors for copyright permission. There is always quite an amount of correspondence in my email. As I only publish weekly, in as much as I can. The publication list is rolling (ongoing)."
(Read more here)
The Pan Review
"I read everything by Plath and moved on rapidly to (Anne) Sexton, Ní Dhomhnaill, Boland, Mina Loy, and H.D. I educated myself in the UCD library and from there began a lifetime of searching for a quality of voice that I felt as 'absence'. I began to read translated works also including Nagy, Sachs, Tuominen, Lorca and others. When I left college I took that sound with me. I got my degree in Art History and English, although the only thing that interested me in English was Old and Middle English."
On publishing women, cultural absence and how to change things at The Pan Review
Compose Journal
The Story Behind "bind" by Chris Murray - Compose Journal -
Narcissus & Stalk The Open Ring - Compose Journal -
Issue 61, The North
Into the Light Blown Dark; Working with Freda Laughton’s ‘Now I am a Tower of Darkness’
Freda Laughton produced one book of poetry, A Transitory House (Jonathan Cape, 1945). At the time of the book’s publication, Freda Laughton would have been thirty-eight years old. Laughton’s chosen sphere was the female intimate, and within this context she was an expressionist of some ability. Her work presaged that of Eavan Boland and of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. There is a certain fragility and darkness in Laughton’s expression which imbues it with shadow. Her art was masterful, not least in the following poem,
‘In a Transitory Beauty’,
‘Maternal the shell
Cradling the embryo bird,
A transitory house,
Fashioned for brief security,
Of purposeful fragility,
A beauty built to be broken.'
(by Freda Laughton)
Order the Magazine here.
Three Red Things (Smithereens Press, 2013)
Cycles (Lapwing Press, 2013)
*The Blind (Oneiros Books, 2013)
*She (Oneiros Books, 2014)
Signature (Bone Orchard Press, 2014)
And Agamemnon Dead; An Anthology of Early 21st Century Irish Poetry (Peter O'Neill and Walter Ruhlmann)
Eavan Boland: Inside History (Arlen house, 2016)
The Gladstone Readings Anthology (Famous Seamus, 2017)
A Hierarchy of Halls (Smithereens Press, 2018)
bind (Turas Press, 2018)
Gold Friend (Turas Press, 2020)
'small mirror' at The Honest Ulsterman
'narcissus' and 'stalk the open ring' at Compose Journal (Spring 2017)
A series from The Blind at Ditch Poetry
From Cycles at Recours au Poème
Three Red Things at Smithereens Press
Glendalough; at Iseult Gonne's Grave at Levure littéraire
Sans at The Southword Journal
A photo-essay detailing the creation of an artwork "Den Of Sibyl Wren (2018) for the book "A Hierarchy of Halls" (Published Smithereens Press, 2018)
My process involves intense working back and forth with words and images in my imagination. I write a lot as part of my creative process as an artist, and these writings help me create and develop visual images. The so-called ‘visual’ image is to me embodied, materialised, haptic and tactile. So the ‘image’ in poetry and metaphorical writing is almost the same as the visual image in art, to me. So there is not a huge gap between text and image. Not in my mind in any case. The flat 2 D image is neither flat nor 2 D – but rather it is a complex and multi-dimensional terrain of emotion, sensation and concept, just as is the written word, especially in poetry.
So it felt very natural to respond to Chris Murray’s very imagistic poetry, which I already love so much.
In preparing to make work in response to A Hierarchy of Halls, I spent time reading and re-reading the poems and reading and re-reading Chris’s little notes she had sent to me via Twitter. And so the The Den of Sibyl Wren emerged. My notes on my own thoughts and responses to reading A Hierarchy of Halls and to what Chris told me about her notion of a Sibyl that represented the wren and its qualities:
What Chris Murray said in a series of little Twitter notes to me: “The chapbook is called 'a hierarchy of halls' and is about small things, flight, wrens, and huge dreamlike structures are implied. My sibyls and messengers are birdlike creatures/ the little chapbook is called 'a hierarchy of halls' and is about a wren's flight through my garden, am obsessed with bird workings. I didn't see a sibyl specifically in bodies, but the first image on the Poethead page has a little putti. This is how my head works: I see the wren as a type of sibyl, a small messenger, and female. The sibyl should represent the wren! A type of oracle who leads one into the book.
All images & images associated with 'Den of Sibyl wren', 'A Hierarchy of Halls', and 'Gold Friend' are © Salma Ahmad Caller |