A Celebration of Irish Women Poets on Bloomsday 2013

Rebecca O’Connor

Domestic Bliss

 
I place a jug of lavender on the table
to mask the smell of mould from under the fridge
 
while you draw nails to hammer with your fist.
Then I draw a hammer , and watch
 
as you try to lift it from the page.
by day it’s Mr Men, Mad Men, by night,
 
your father and I wishing we could be so bold.
you have no such wants, though sometimes I wonder
 
as you try to peer into Jack and Jill’s well
or climb the tiny ladder of your toy farm
to mend the roof of your miniature barn.
 

–  Rebecca O’Connor

Rebecca O’Connor edits The Moth Magazine and organises the Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize. She worked as a commissioning editor of literary fiction at Telegram Books in London before returning to Ireland with her family in 2008. She won a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2004 and her chapbook Poems was published by the Wordsworth Trust, where she was a writer in residence in 2005. Her poetry has been published in, among other places, The Guardian, Poetry Review and The Spectator.

Kelly Creighton

World Put to Rights

 
The dream that burst riverbanks
held you; blackstrap molasses,
antidote for your poison.
 
Your plummets spraying wetness
like a coin in a cascade
woke no-one, not even us.
 
The church spire grew legs, scaled bricks,
ran to your side, spotlighted.
I put glass over that glow.
 
Quiet-huff of your refuge,
flailing arms, spluttering snores.
Ungainly crooning tunes
 
to the realms of purity;
I found too sickly-sweet. You
fought the humdrum, from your seat.
 
You would sleep outside, would sing,
stand on ledges mollified.
I won’t sing, no matter what.
 
Float on, keep your whistles of
booze-hounds. When I awaken
I will join you, watch for me.
 
World Put to Rights is © Kelly Creighton , all rights reserved.

Kelly Creighton

Kelly Creighton is a poet and writer with work currently and forthcoming in literary journals Ranfurly Review, A New Ulster, Electric Windmill Press, Inkspill Magazine, The Galway Review, Saudade Review, PEN Austria’s Time to Say: No! e-book, Recours au Poeme and other numerous other publications. She has recently finished editing her historical fiction novel Yielding Fruit. Kelly is working on her second poetry collection.

Moya Cannon

Viola D’Amore

 
Sometimes, love does die,
but sometimes , a stream on porous rock,
it slips down into the inner dark of a hill,
joins with other hidden streams
to travel blind as the white fish that live in it.
It forsakes one underground streambed
for the cave that runs under it.
Unseen , it informs the hill
and , like the hidden streams of the viola d’amore,
makes the hill reverberate,
so that people who wander there
wonder why the hill sings,
wonder why they find wells.
 
Viola D’Amore is ©  Moya Cannon
 
Bio (source Wikipedia)

Moya Cannon was born in 1956 in Dunfanaghy, County Donegal. She studied History and Politics at University College Dublin, and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

She has taught in the Gaelscoil in Inchicore, in a school for adolescent travellers in Galway, and at the National University of Ireland in Galway. She served as editor of Poetry Ireland in 1995. Her work has appeared in a number of international anthologies and she has held writer-in-residence posts for Kerry County Council and Trent University Ontario (1994–95).

Cannon became a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of creative artists in Ireland, in 2004.

Her first book, Oar, (Salmon 1990, revised edition Gallery Press 2000) won the 1991 Brendan Behan Memorial Prize. It was followed by The Parchment Boat in 1997. Carrying the Songs: New and Selected Poems was published by Carcanet Press in 2007.

Dorothea Herbert

The Rights Of Woman,

Or Fashions for the Year 93 – being the Era of Women’s literally wearing the Breeches. – Health and Fraternity!
 
Whilst man is so busy asserting his Rights
Shall Woman lie still without gaining new lights
Our sex have been surely restrain’d enough
By stiff prudish Dress and such old fahion’d stuff
Too long have been fetter’d and tramelld I wot
With Cumbersome Trains and the Strict petticoat
Yet should a poor Wife dare her Tyrant to chide
Oh she wears the Breeches they tauntingly cried
But now we’re enlighten’d they’ll find to their Shame
We’ll have the reality not the bare Name
No longer will Woman to Satire be Dupe
For she is determin’d to figure Sans Jupe
And once she is rouzed she will not be outdone
Nor stop at this one Reformation alone
For mark me proud Man she’ll not yield thee a Jot
But soon will become e’en a true Sans-Culote
And flourish away e’er the Ending of Spring
Sans Jupe, Sans Culote , in short – sans any thing
 
– Ca va et ca…ira
–Liberty and Equality for ever ! 
 
© by Dorothea Herbert
 
from, Introspections, the Poetry and Private World of Dorothea Herbert by Frances Finnegan , Congrave Press 2011.
 
from Congrave Press

The “lost” poetry of the celebrated Irish writer Dorothea Herbert, whose Retrospections, first published in 1929-30 more than a century after her death, continues to captivate readers.  By turns amusing and melancholic, the recently recovered poems – and particularly her astonishing mock-heroic epic The Buckiad – are an important contribution to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Irish literature.

Paula Meehan

Seed

 
The first warm day of spring
and I step out into the garden from the gloom
of a house where hope had died
to tally the storm damage, to seek what may
have survived. And finding some forgotten
lupins I’d sown from seed last autumn
holding in their fingers a raindrop each
like a peace offering, or a promise,
I am suddenly grateful and would
offer a prayer if I believed in God.
But not believing, I bless the power of seed,
its casual, useful persistence,
and bless the power of sun,
its conspiracy with the underground,
and thank my stars the winter’s ended.
 
‘Seed’ is © Paula Meehan, all rights reserved.

Paula Meehan

Paula Meehan has published five collections of poetry, the most recent being Painting Rain (Carcanet, 2009). A selected volume, entitled Mysteries of the Home, was published in 1996. Her writing for stage includes the plays Mrs Sweeney (1997), Cell (1999), and, for children, Kirkle (1995), The Voyage (1997) and The Wolf of Winter (2003/2004). Her poetry has been set to music by artists as diverse as the avant-garde composer John Wolf Brennan and the folksinger Christy Moore.

Eileen Sheehan

All About Climbing

 
After he slaughtered her
he dumped her body
in the market square
 
where merchants and citizens
continued their trading
 
averting their eyes
from the sight of
her broken corpse;
the limbs skewed
at grotesque angles.
 
A fly alighted on her eyelid
its blue-green body
gleaming like a jewel.
 
A mouse
nibbled flour
from under a fingernail.
 
A goat strayed from its pen
sniffed at her body
lay down beside her.
 
Her house cat
navigated the alleyways
of the rural town
till he found her.
 
A rat curled to sleep
in her armpit.
 
Then the last slice of moon
slid down from the sky,
lodged in the small of her back.
 
From high in the hay loft
an owl let out
it’s long note
across the dark
 
and that was the sound
she heard as she woke;
the sound that led her
to walk to the foot
of the mountain.
 
Now she carries
the moon on her back
and she climbs.
 
Her days are all about climbing;
all about purpose;
 
committed
to restore the moon
to the sky:
hang it aloft.
 
So she climbs
in her blood-red shoes,
her tattered garments:
 
there is no slipping back.
 
© Eileen Sheehan
 
from the collection Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books)

Eileen Sheehan

Eileen Sheehan is from Killarney, Co Kerry. Her collections are Song of the Midnight Fox and Down the Sunlit Hall (Doghouse Books). Anthology publications include The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets (ed Joan McBreen/Salmon Poetry) and TEXT: A Transition Year English Reader (ed Niall MacMonagle/ Celtic Press). She has worked as Poet in Residence with Limerick Co Council Arts Office and is on the organizing committee for Éigse Michael Hartnett Literary & Arts Festival. Her third collection, The Narrow Place of Souls, is forthcoming.

Mary O’ Donnell

Hungary

 
came to me in stamps.
“Magyar Posta” ice-skaters, delicate
as Empire porcelain, a fish, an astronaut
and rocket, a silvery boy on 1960s skis.
I understood only difference.
Now, flying home from Budapest,
I touch the pages of my poems, freshly minted
in translation. Now I really don’t get them,
but did I ever? The words will make me
briefly native to a coffee-slugging morning reader
on the Vaci Ut, who may not understand,
even in his own tongue.
The lines shimmer as night slips
through the tilting crowded cabin. Again
I press fingers to page, blind, as if by touch
I could capture a fish, an astronaut, a rocket,
or those elegant, ice-cutting skaters.
Outside, clouds I cannot see
busily translate country to country.

Hungary is ©  Mary O’ Donnell
 

Mary O’Donnell is the author of eleven books, both poetry and fiction, and has also co-edited a book of translations from the Galician. Her titles include the best-selling literary novel “The Light-Makers”, “Virgin and the Boy”, and “The Elysium Testament”, as well as poetry such as “The Place of Miracles”, “Unlegendary Heroes”, and her most recent critically acclaimed sixth collection “The Ark Builders” (Arc Publications UK, 2009). She has been a teacher and has worked intermittently in journalism, especially theatre criticism. Her essays on contemporary literary issues are widely published. She also presented and scripted three series of poetry programmes for the national broadcaster RTE Radio, including a successful series on poetry in translation during 2005 and 2006 called ‘Crossing the Lines‘. Today, she teaches creative writing in a part time capacity at NUI Maynooth, and has worked on the faculty of Carlow University Pittsburgh’s MFA programme in creative writing, as well as on the faculty of the University of Iowa’s summer writing programme at Trinity College Dublin.