Patricia’s Blog
In the Stepping Stones interviews Seamus Heaney spoke to Dennis O’Driscoll about the ‘power of a dividing line’: the line of the first ploughed furrow; the laying of a house foundation; the marking out of a football pitch; the place of sanctuary behind the altar rails; the space between graveyard and road. Lines mark out spaces that…
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I was back on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork recently after an absence of over a decade. I had forgotten the shock of seeing the tall remnants of the nineteenth-century copper mine at Allihies astride the rocks and the Atlantic Ocean everywhere I looked. If my words were inadequate to describe the experience of the physical landscape…
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It looks like good weather for the holiday weekend in Ireland. Time for breaks and trips. I like to link text and place when travelling. As I’m heading off to County Mayo, I thought I would pull together – in a fairly random way – some of my favourite texts linked to some wonderful Mayo…
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Controversy has a way of revolving around words in Ireland in a strange way. Even when Barak Obama, President of the United States, visits we get caught up in a national debate about Enda Kenny’s welcoming speech in College Green, Dublin, and his use of Barak Obama’s very own words. But, An Taoiseach’s gift of words to…
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Mae Leonard’s new book of poetry makes me think of a patchwork quilt – places, family, history, tragedies and quirky events all woven into a wonderful and seamless whole. I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This has just been published by Doghouse Books and was launched at Limerick’s On the Nail Readings event where Mae read with…
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Michael Longley’s new volume A Hundred Doors is slim and snug and almost weightless in the hand. He returns again, almost apologetically, to a place that changed his life: ‘I am writing too much about Carrigskeewaun.’ He is there for the millennium, at Christmas, at lambing time, and – for the first time – with his new…
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So said Margaret Hayes, Dublin City Librarian at the opening of the DublinSwell event in the city’s gleaming, green-lit, Convention Centre last week. This, she said, was Ireland’s largest literary event ever. It was a celebration of Dublin’s listing as a UNESCO City of Literature – one of only four cities in the world to receive this…
Read Morehttp://www.writing.ie/writers-toolbox/writing-better-poetry/getting-started-poetry/131-mary-odonnell-what-is-poetry.html Mary O’Donnell’s piece from the recently launched Writing.ie provides an insightful perspective from a practitioner into what poetry is and what poetry is not. Mary O’Donnell: What Poetry Is
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Jo Slade’s biography poem The Artist’s Room traces the artist Gwen John (1876-1939) through Paris at the start of the twentieth-century: ‘I looked for her in Paris…/ walked from place to place, lived the smells, the sounds, / followed a plan I’d drawn.’ A painter-poet, Jo Slade uses her artist’s eye to distill the essence of Gwen John’s…
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This morning I watched online as crowds at Newgrange gathered to experience the coincidence of a winter solstice and lunar eclipse only to be disappointed when snow clouds prevented the blended light of sun and moon from seeping though the passage tomb. Out the window a blackbird chases a robin from the bread I’ve left under…
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