Dear Freda Laughton, your poems are being discussed at Jacket2 Magazine

Dear Freda Laughton, Your Poems are being discussed at Jacket2 Magazine

Walt Hunter writes for Jacket2 on Dave Lordan’s interview with Emma Penney about the modern Irish woman poet Freda Laughton. Freda Laughton was born in Bristol in 1907 and moved to Co. Down after her marriage. She published one collection of poetry A Transitory House in 1945, but little else is known about her life and work. She may have lived in Dublin for some time, as her poem The Welcome details the textures of Dublin City and its suburbs, and suggests she knows the city by heart. Her date of death is unknown. There are some Freda Laughton poems published on Poethead here. 

The most interesting thing I read during a weekend of convalescence, under a March sun that seemed surprised at its own intensity, was an interview with Emma Penney on the website The Bogman’s Cannon about an Irish modernist poet, Freda Laughton. Although Laughton was born in 1907, I feature the interview and her poems here because critical genealogies of twentieth-century Irish poetry are in the process of expanding dramatically. Laughton provides an alternative provenance and inspiration for some of today’s writers and their concerns or interventions—as Penney points out:

The lack of critical interest in Laughton reflects the selective vision of literary traditions which often exclude poets who do not fit with the contemporary moment or who may trouble the formation of new movements. Irish critics during the 70’s and 80’s held Eavan Boland to be the first writer to express what “poetic being” was for a woman; the first to express the domestic; motherhood; the first to map Dublin city as a woman. Laughton expresses all of these experiences in her work decades before Boland.

You can read the full article at Now I am a tower of darkness | Jacket2.