How had the pandemic affected my work? It was a pleasure to be invited to contribute to the annual journal of St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University where I read English between 1975 and 1978.
Amongst the strongest of covid’s impacts for me was a repeated sense of indignation at how often government failed to take proper care of the most vulnerable.
A lovely start to the year – a writerly celebration of Nollaig na mBan (Christmas of the Women). It was an Irish tradition that women had a day off household work on the feast of the Epiphany, the 6th January, the last day of the Christmas season).
On Wednesday 5th January at 17.30 ET/10.30pm UK time) the Irish Network DC has arranged a zoom reading of work from North Star, an anthology of work by female writers from Northern Ireland. This was published by Women Aloud NI, a burgeoning network of women writers.
Angeline King, Gráinne Tobin, Shelley Tracey and I will be reading our work from the anthology.
The event is supported by the Irish Embassy in the USA, the Northern Ireland Bureau (the Northern Ireland Executive’s diplomatic arm in the USA) and the Irish American Partnership.
I’m particularly pleased to be reading a poem which has a link to America. As for many Irish people, emigration has resulted in my having relatives across the United States and this poem is about an appearance of my grandfather at his great-grand-daughter’s wedding, all the way from America.
Belfast’s Linen Hall Library arranged a conversation between me and Dr Frank Ferguson on the short story as witness, based on my collection of stories, ‘A City Burning’.
You can watch the event here
here:
My Ulster-Scots poem A Heerd Tha Sodjer on Tha Radio was featured on BBC Radio Ulster’s KINTRA
The poem won first prize in the inaugural Linen Hall Ulster-Scots Writing Competition. It’s about the evacuations from Kabul in August. A person in Ulster hearing a British soldier talking on the radio about preventing people from accessing the airport. His vivid account sweeps the listener up into a tragic event and into the trauma suffered by the soldier. Listening in the safety of home, thousands of miles away, how can one react to such circumstances?
It isn’t often a poet gets to listen in on a discussion of a poem and, thankfully, this one was entirely positive. I was particularly struck by co-presenter, Rab Lennox’s reaction. He made the point that every time he’d heard about that evacuation situation it was always reported in English ‘but tae hear it in yer ain tongue, it maks it all tha mair real.. It shakes ye.’
Poet, Anne McMaster commented on the strong emotional current in the poem and said that when she writes in Ulster-Scots she is going ‘tae tha wurds that lift frae yer hairt’, as though writing in Ulster-Scots drives the process down a layer, deeper into her emotion.
Presenter, Helen Mark, in an interview with me, said that I had used, ‘rich, strong Ulster-Scots… for a very just-happened, modern-day’ story. Ulster-Scots is, to me, very much about ‘present experience and everyday life.’
It was a pleasure to hear Gary Morgan, who won second prize for poetry, in an interview with Jonny Crawford. Gary is from Carnlough , or ‘Carnla’, as locals say. He talked about growing up in a Catholic background and what that meant ‘tae us weans’. HIs poem, ‘The Confeshion’ is about a child’s experience of recounting his sins and the interaction between parish and home. He said that ‘sometimes Ulstèr-Scots has, maybe unfairly, been seen as a Presbyterian language and that’s not a hundred percent true… where I live it would be quite a diverse community an everybody wud engage in speakin in wurds o Ulster-Scots at some time o the day an I just wanted tae maybe inspire ither people tae show an interest an express themelves through tha Ulster-Scots.’
This is a really touching & heartfelt piece of work made even stronger by the Ulster Scots in which it speaks truths in a non-narcisstic & open way to which many could relate… in the modern world it speaks of.
Continue reading 1st Prize Poetry – Linen Hall Ulster-Scots Writing Competition
The pedigree of Dedalus Press is enviable. Founded in 1985, it is one of the leading publishers of poetry in Ireland. Its editor, Pat Boran has selected the contents of this new anthology.
Dedalus invited poets to contribute to
a poetry map of the island of Ireland, south and north, a map like no other.
‘We want to recognise and celebrate the power of poetry to guide, to heal, to console and to reassure, to offer a necessary glimpse of otherness and elsewhere in troubling times such as these.
DERRY LAUNCH: 
Poets featured in the anthology appeared either in person or virtually at the Centre for Contemporary Art in the heart of Derry city. Hosted by Cat Brogan
Little Acorns bookstore has the anthology available to buy. Online purchase via Local Wonders – Dedalus Press
Local Wonders can be ordered here
VISION, NORTH ANTRIM
The Carrickmore Road hems my parish of Culfeightrin
where its townlands − Broughanlea, Drumaroan, Tornabodagh, Tornaroan −
dip their skirts into the Sea of Moyle
(with a last flounce of grassy clefts, precarious caravans
and a beading of white houses)
before relinquishing themselves
to waves that take the colour of the sky, a jumbled grey.
Here all is profusely, wetly, Irishly grey or green;
even the light arrives through a dampened veil yet
pagoda roofs, crimson
− the hedges are full of them.
Each dangles a furl of imperial purple,
a firework spurting tiny comets
down to a mossy sky.
That veil’s dissolving. I see
sulphur-yellow sunbursts in the ditch;
hard globes of military red strung on the bushes
for a brash tattoo; cockades – vermilion –
tossed up among the brambles by a hidden crowd;
medals of cerise pinned to the ferny cliffs; corsages of
hot lavender, burnt orange, the colour lucifer…
Is it because I’ve reached this edge
that I have eyes at last to see
what has been burning always
within my coolest day?
After these months of paring down, let me keep
my vision stripped,
here where there is no further north.
On 2 August The Irish Times carried my article Northern Ireland and Wales: a double vision. It was a pleasure to consider my decades working in both places and how each has fed me and challenged me creatively.
They’ll soon be here! And I am very pleased to have had a poem accepted for Black Bough Poetry’s anthology for Christmas / Winter 2021
If you like imagist poetry, short and intense, this could be the present for the poet in your life. Last year’s edition was beautifully illustrated by Emma Bissonnet. Continue reading A Poem in Black Bough Poetry’s Christmas/Winter edition
I’m delighted to have a poem accepted for 2 publications by Arachne Press : A470 and Words From The Brink.
An Irishwoman is Introduced to the Major Roads of Wales will appear in March next year in the anthology A470.
Because I Have Been Complacent About Climate Change will appear in the anthology Words from the Brink and at the Solstice Shorts Festival this December. Continue reading Poems in 2 Arachne Press publications
What I learned from actor, Finlay James’s performance of my poem Watching The Bridegroom in the June 2021 issue of The Honest Ulsterman.