Category: 25 Pins in a packet women creators

Previews from ‘In Havoc Lights’ by Michael McAloran

October 10th, 2013

vii-

…vertigo ice/ what said/ yes/ said/ it follows/ the clasp-knife breath that lingers/ in the rat deep of vermin obsolete/ of the night’s claim/ shadowed by meat/ in the presence of the none/ a blind man’s cane tracing the brail sheets of nothing left to be/ inherent dice of the unknown/ till failure/ terror of/ asking then of the what till else/ semblant/ dissipatory/ click-clack and the roundelay of ashen promises/ so speaks the silence filled with a grandeur of displaced light/ in the laughter of confrontation with the hope that never was/ as so swings the light bulb in a deserted room filled with scarlet dust with scarlet vapours/ till a-dream in sun lights/ hence the spectacle/ the a-breeze block smashing out the remnants of the ongoing/ here alack/ vibratory tone/ perhaps/ else/ till foreign once again/ [we all fall down]/ drag of the pelt of skinned longing/ here or there a vibrant echoing/ voices/ the voice grasping for nothing/ vagrant the ice subtle as the dawn growing upon the unearth-ed flesh/ breath no/ violet no/ synergy/ some distance of/ collapse of/ said without spoken/ glacial the tide consumes the lack of air/ lung-lack/ spitting out the teeth of pissoir abnegation/ furtive/ in the silence of ever having been/ as if…sudden as if…back then to fall upon the crest the wave of it/ oceanic as a cadaver’s wonderment…

xi-

…undone/ travail yes or no/ till absentee/ a colourless distance to bear/ as if the given speech were other than/ spit polish and the ashen weight of never having been/ the silence of never having been/ in retrospect/ hard pushed/ give or take a day or naught/ settling/ settling/ throughout the given dissipate of the mock sun’s spun/ in havoc lights where claim is disrepute/ scarred the air melds in a circus dislocation/ given yes to fall/ here or there a rhythm/ a calking of features marred by ongoing finality/ snap-snap the fingers cracking/ through the delve into/ of the fragrance of/ silenced by night/ one step to take above all others/ it says/ it murmurs/ as if some encore were possible in the bleak thin air of some foreign beginning/ given to task of/ all around/ beyond/ step non-step then back to the outset of commence/ here a ruptured breathing/ such is/ what known/ nothing of/ the fingers search the lie/ a mercury tear/ given to speeches unheard/ in the collapse of all/ where mimicry shadows break upon cylindrical walls/ unearthed prayers of the dead/ none to follow/ merely to gaze upon/ through cataract eyes bound by ennui/ hence the laughter never ceases to be/ and the rot of light or vapours/ posits and henceforth yet of the given lapse in each motion of the un-primed/ and so/ step/ retrace/ trace yet following on from the none that came before/ yet still the breathless pace of haven lest to fall/ sudden then to ask/ as if the voice were never more silent…

xiii-

…no shelter from the ragged taste/ of excrement/ till trace composed/ figment or no/ haggard blood set till ember of/ scuttle of dead vermin tears/ this is sun light’s breath/ stillness of cadaver’s shine// head buried in the glimmer of the eye/ till obsolete passage/ imprint of none/ mocked spun of passage in the depths of silence/ echo of veranda/ cleft yes/ subtle yes to fall/ and so the emptiness of boned meat/ a meat hook stylus and the caress of nothing/ sneer speech/ absent speech/ traces yet to divulge/ (echoing laughter)/ the skyline it mocks it does not mock/ the earth sucks upon dead bodies/ and so in this/ the earth mocks the frozen words/ graceful to trace lies all lies it echoes/ and so forth/ breathe/ inhalations of razors and the spit of blood/ of cum/ vibrant the nocturne makes nothing of/ the eyeball sliced/ caressed by tongue/ what wounds/ effortless/ salient/ nocturne of spit speeches/ prayers to the none of/ from the none of/ walls paper walls and the skeletal starched/ back-light of a room filled with nooses/ give or take an inch/ enough to go around/ these are the dead lands/ these are the cactus lands/ spread out like a patient/ etherised upon an operating table/ in the skull of there ever having been/ stone knocked upon this is the salvage/ the nerve struck/ till dark/ all is dark/ the bone break of winter fathom and the blood struck fathomless/ given as if to cross the passage inwardly/ the voice is forever embers of what is no longer imminent/ unless/ and so the light fades/ so it burns let it go/ scraps torn away in a dressage of sight/ petals to dust/ nothing ever touched upon…

xiv-

…swaying meat/ an overture of silenced/ the dried blood of wounds and the clasp of nothing/ vibration/ yes/ as if it once/ the syringe beauty of the skulled ice/ vermin air/ the asking of as if it were other than/ null/ void/ pennies upon the eyes/ time’s passing/ absence of time/ the stain of bloody words in sands the sands of which devoured/ yet of/ so it is said/ hands dead the virus effigy/ and so it carries/ there is breath through the sneer of teeth what matter what have you/ in an elixir of silence/ (only then/ only there)/ ah the grace is enough it is not enough/ skeletal signs/ the traces of the seen/ bring out your dead your living/ nothing is all// …the fingers bite the skyline/ hence bled there is no other laughter/ collapsed/ collapsed/ head-struck the distance traced/ life no answer/ and yet the burn is this/ given to replicate/ repeat/ echo yes there will be echoes/ such is the lie of having been/ as if recalling were to recall/ in-step/ (laughter)/ the bare foot skeletal skinned of flesh makes impart in dirt// vacancy all/ dead spaces/ the hands absent the voice absent/ the shiv cannot collect the dawning/ drunkenly the whispers of teeth skin the collective waste/ there is none/ naught/ dispersed the collapsed longing for/ in the haven of desire/ till drag of obsolete returns/ voices/ voices/ the hiddeness thronged/ blinded by something that can never be spat out/ will never trickle away like piss/ and so …

These previews are © Michael McAloran , from In Havoc Lights

“Ultrasound” and other poems by Denise Blake

October 5th, 2013

Ultrasound

A hand rests at your forehead
as if pondering a deep problem.
Your arm hides the strong heartbeat
but it is there, quietly reassuring.
A bent knee that will soon straighten
and kick out. Imaging your world,
the place of safety for ten more weeks.

Can you hear the noises, the daily rhythms
of your parents voices? Can you tell
how new they are to this whole experience?
In the distance, at a lower pitch are the elders,
and the soft echo of uncles, aunts and cousins.

This has been the strangest of summers.
You may never learn of the pressures
that buffeted your parents, or ever know
how each scan showing clenched fingers,
stretching limbs, held them both above
the rise and falling waves of anxieties.
How each image sent the frequency of hope.

Adjusting

The saucepan is full of leftover potatoes
and I keep cooking too much rice or pasta.
Three placemats still sit on our dining table.
Silence has become a strong presence.
Our hall light stays on all through the night
after years of not sleeping in total darkness.
I keep expecting a four o’clock return from school,
while our youngest settles into Halls in Dublin.

While our youngest settles into Halls in Dublin,
I keep expecting a four o’clock return from school.
After years of not sleeping in total darkness
our hall light stays on all through the night.
Silence has become a strong presence.
Three placemats still sit on our dining table
and I keep cooking too much rice or pasta.
The saucepan is full of leftover potatoes.

Beyond the Front Door

It happens here, in our front porch
when your Dad and I have been away.
Moving towards the door, keys in hand,
I fall into some other family dimension.

When I turn the key in the lock, press down
on the handle, the door creaking open,
I imagine things within our home will be altered.
The tidy house we had left behind will be lived-in.

Any mail will be lifted from the mat, thrown
on the stairs, clothes strewn across the banister.
The hall light that we kept on for security
will be off. The rooms will be humid warm.

Cold pizza slices in a cardboard box, an empty
coke can lying on the table. And instead of being
away at university, you’ll be laid back on a sofa
singing a head-phoned song joyously loud.

It is not that I would wish student days differently
for you, the youngest of our away-flung brood.
But after a lifetime parenting, space and time
and my maternal senses need to be re-aligned.

Our living space has been changed by your absence.
And Ian, as you stand outside your apartment door,
is there a moment that you wish; when I turn the key
I want to smell cheese melting on Mum’s lasagne.

Ultrasound , Adjusting , and Beyond The Front Door are © Denise Blake

Denise Blake has two collections, Take a Deep Breath (2004) How to Spin Without Getting Dizzy (2010) published by Summer Palace Press She is a regular contributor to RTE radio 1’s show, Sunday Miscellany . Denise read as part of the Poetry Ireland’s Lunchtime Series and at ÓBhéal as well as many other readings around the country. She is on the Poetry Ireland directory for Writers in Schools and has wide experience facilitating workshops for adults.

‘The Royal Canal’ by Janice Fitzpatrick Simmons

September 21st, 2013

The Royal Canal

Locks

The worst fear I have
is travelling through a grave-
the dark in which somehow your eyes
still see the light. We came to the gates
and you left the barge with lock key,
to open those gates for me-

the gates held shut against me,
the gates where Odysseus
summoned his dead to presence.
And there I was at the gates middles aged,
driving Charon’s boat across the Styx
What a wild panic! The barge steering
itself against my will.

You were straining with the machinery
to let me through. How could I let you down?
Anger at my fear fed me now
so I mastered the barge, drove into the lock
and held there while the gates gonged shut behind me.

Celebrations

Thomastown Harbour mellow
warm spring evening on the Royal Canal
with you. Blackthorns and willow blossoming
on the banks. This the warmest spring that I remember.

A canal boat, you and me,
hard physical work- tired and rewarded
by experience. The small dark cered moorhens
in their nests; mooring sometimes au sauvage- in nature-
Thoreau and Walden Pond – this journal
and notes of how I love you.

The dawn chorus of birds is many voiced,
so many voices for us to hear and hear again.
Here is our journey with a purpose.
You and I on the canal that moves on,
moves slowly toward you and slowly toward me.

Swan Alone

A swan without a mate
followed the barge along the canal.
She was a harbinger
of what it is to love without,
for now she loved the barge
and followed its movements.

Following first from a distance and behind
I watched the growing light gather round
her whiteness. Then in an ecstasy of wings
she passed low over the boat-
her curving body and the audible
beat of wings ten feet above me. Me the girl inside
was caught by tears for you my lost mate.
And here I was on a barge with a man I love

who leaves me mostly on my own
but not now coming from Westmeath’s
Thomastown, through Hyde Park,
the Cappagh Bog. The swan floated in the light
of a rising clay-red sun burning
the frost to a ghosting mist leading us on
to The Hill of Down and then rising she was gone,
returned to her own mysteries.

Lost Things

Shimmering pink sea water
in the sand flats and out further
tractors, oyster gatherers bending
to their cold work- a little cold

in this room too, so the children
not children build me a fire
while I watch the sun go down
thinking about lost things
and the future with or without you.

The Royal Canal Sequence is © Janice Fitzpatrick Simmons, from Saint Michael In Peril Of The Sea Published Salmon Press 2009.

fitzpatricksimmonsjanice Janice Fitzpatrick Simmons

Her collections are Leaving America (Lapwing, 1992); Settler (Cliffs of Moher, Co Clare, Salmon Publishing, 1995); Starting at Purgatory (Salmon Publishing, 1999); The Bowspirit (Belfast, Lagan Press, 2005); and Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea (Salmon Poetry, 2009).

A former Assistant Director of The Robert Frost Place in New Hampshire, with James Simmons she was co-founder and Director of The Poets’ House/Teach na hÉigse, most latterly located in Falcarragh, County Donegal.

She lives in Donegal.

Saint Michael In Peril Of The Sea

Martyrdom by Kristina Marie Darling

September 7th, 2013

'Visitation' by Noah Saterstrom (2012) — ‘Visitation’ by Noah Saterstrom (2012)

Martyrdom

I never imagined love as a cause for suicide. But there we
were, surrounded by all of the tell-tale signs: a breadknife,
a withered corsage, a white dress with some ruffles along
the bottom.

The night before I sensed that something had gone
terribly wrong. He told her, brushing the hair from his
eyes, how her sonnets failed to turn at the Volta.

Now she’s gliding along the surface of the lake. Her hands
folded like the knot on a small bouquet.

So he tries and tries to wake her. He looks at her perfect
wrists, nearly submerged: cold skin, a silver watch, every
bracelet fastened in place.

Martyrdom is © Kristina Marie Darling, from Brushes With (Blazevox Books 2013)

‘leave this death alone’ by Candi V. Auchterlonie

August 30th, 2013

purple blue thistle

ghosts/ghosting mouths
they’re pulling purple blue thistle/our heads
prickle their grey thumbs.
the un-holdable bouquet/clamped
with their veil of see through teeth
blood is not blood it is
a shadow veining the natural light
that our eyes fail to adjust to
and our glossy mouths fail to lipsynch
the weeded purply hill
when we speak between that strained speech

purple blue thistle is © Candi V. Auchterlonie

lookers stone

looking glass/under glass eye stares they become lazy moons/but try to catch these petaled fliers with your hands,
just try, they’re slippery mints tonguing fate.
my house is plagued with the secret of mint moths and they’ve begun to eat the hearts out from all of my best coats.

lookers stone is © Candi V. Auchterlonie

tearing cotton from your breast

poems from grand static/stasis that hurts with its stained whiteness.

tearing cotton from your breast is © Candi V. Auchterlonie

the flood of man

the tall-tall creek/creeps into your backyard.
your very own backyard/and you flood
a river into the wild
your things/they trickle out of your life
the things you always meant to keep.

the flood of man is © Candi V. Auchterlonie

the long drive

you will always have
the right of way.

the long drive is © Candi V. Auchterlonie

into the day we dream/into the night we work

spines are bridges
for tomorrow
we hold every hope up
to the jagged shadows of our bindings
each and each colourless moth
of us dissolves within the window pane of day/flirting death
only separate as wings are.
we hold every hope/we might chance/ideas of forever
and stay with them.

into the day we dream/into the night we work is © Candi V. Auchterlonie

The above poems are from Candi V. Auchterlonie’s forthcoming collection , leave this death alone. I am linking here her previous collection , Impress (Published by Punk Hostage Press, 2012)

Impress

Candi’s Homepage

Ingeborg Bachmann’s Poetry in translation by Mary O’Donnell 1.

August 28th, 2013
FREIGHT

Summer’s great cargo is loaded,
the sun-freight lies ready in the dock,
even if a gull cries and plunges behind you.
Summer’s great cargo is loaded.

The sun-freight lies ready in the dock,
the smiles of lemurs are unveiled
on the lips of those on the galley.
The sun-freight lies ready in the dock.

Even if a gull cries and plunges behind you,
the command to go down comes from the West;
wide-eyed, you’ll drown in light nonetheless,
even if a gull cries and plunges behind you.

Freight is © Ingeborg Bachmann. This translation is © Mary O’Donnell

FOGLAND

In winter my lover thrives
among the forest creatures.
The laughing fox knows I must return
before morning.
How the clouds tremble! And a layer
of broken ice falls on me
from the snow craters.

In winter my lover
is a tree among trees inviting
the melancholic crows
to its lovely branches. She knows
that at dusk, the wind will raise
her stiff adorned evening gown
and chase me home.

In winter my lover
swims mute among the fish.
On the bank, I stand in thrall to waters,
caressed from within
by the stroke of her fins.
I watch as she dips and turns,
till banished by the floes.

And warned once more by the shriek
of the bird that arcs stiffly
above, I head for the open field: there
she plucks the hens bald,
throws me a white collarbone.
I wield it to my throat,
make my way through the scattered plumage.

A faithless lover, as well I know,
at times she sweeps into town
in her high-heels,
she parades herself in bars, the straw
from her glass deep in her mouth,
the mot juste tripping from her lips.
I do not understand this language.

I have seen fog-land,
I have eaten the smoke-screened heart.

from Anrufen des Großen Bären/Invoking the Great Bear by Ingeborg Bachmann ©. This translation is © Mary O’Donnell
- Mary O’Donnell’s Homepage
- PoemHunter for Ingeborg Bachmann

Kate O’Shea is a crack poet

August 17th, 2013

Eggs

His poems are words upon words
like eggs smeared with henshit.
They could be free range or organic –
who knows? Too calculated to be risky.
I buy 30 for 1.99 in Liberties Market
and dodge small boys with girls’ earrings
who have never heard of Jackson Pollock
but make an impression on the
bottom of Francis Street and day-trippers,
a stone’s throw from the Bad Art Gallery
which is pretty all right if you like
Mia Funk and well-built women
doing dirty things with bananas.
That’s the problem with men
who are too into blowjobs
more words upon words
like eggs smeared with henshit –
stylised, idolised.

Eggs is © Kate O’Shea

Tadpole

Misery heaped on misery like an Irish Sunday dinner.
It’s hard to swallow; lives like this happen to people
that sprouted dreams like Mr Potato head.
Once fat faces chipped away by keeping body
and soul a hive of useless colony,
the queen bee washed-out and martyred.
Even back then with bamboo rod
and fishing net, catching tadpoles in jam jars,
I wrote sentences in water, used the strange
bodies as living commas, apostrophes
following Os, no ownership,
unlike other daughters I scrutinized in photographs,
I turned wild like the ditches dividing fields,
at the roadside, always on the edge, barbed,
keeping out of the way, scuttling in the sunlight
with rabbits and wrens, foxes, badgers, and hedgehogs.
Words hurt like a kick in the teeth. A fist.

Sitting at a desk I feel I have come full circle.
Tadpoles swim in the pupils of my eyes,
drip from my tongue, squirm on the page for all to see.
I imagine a thumb come to squish them.
I imagine his hazel eyes,
dumb as nuts telling me nothing –
the mouth moves like a loom.
Conformity, conformity, conformity.
I am sick of language, and even he cannot comfort me.
Old allegiances like dead frogs
spread-eagled to reveal their insides.
Anatomical clocks. Ancillary. Tadpoles.

Tadpole is © Kate O’Shea

Dandelion Clocks

Female poets with cropped hair bang on about their weariness,
world-weariness and immortality on the grey page.
There is grief and they are all alone, day after day after day,
their lovers have skedaddled, now they drag the icy moon
after them like a giant pill into middle age.

This is the stage I dive roll across like a navy SEAL
avoiding cat flaps and vintage night gowns with tiny buttons
up to the neck, trying not to look pensive,
that finger-cocked-under-the-chin faraway gaze
like Rodin’s statue, but not the same. Bang.

I inhabit a different space, my only dread, going home,
or whatever that means, to hang like a windsock
on a calm day, slightly awkward and out of place.
I have moved on and how I chose to wear my hair
contains no clue to my tabernacle, the fugitive in me
plays rummy and quaffs light beer, takes two foreign holidays
a year and listens to Wallis Bird full blast – ‘To My Bones’.

I scrimped and saved all my words for grand sentences
and the joy of christening nameless things,
whether broken or chipped, chilled by the breath of history,
no longer walking on tiptoe but stomping a sean-nós dance,
and here is the mystery, my feet dodging the bodies
scattered across the floor like unloved seeds of blow balls,
our dandelion clocks.

Dandelion Clocks is © Kate O’Shea

Kate O’Shea lives in Dublin. Her chapbook Crackpoet is available on Amazon. She was short listed for the Cork Literary Review Poetry Manuscript Competition and the Patrick Kavanagh Award twice. She is widely published in journals abroad. Her latest publications were in The Seranac Review, Orbis, Cyphers, Outburst, and Prole. Most recently she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in America.

She has been published in Icarus, Electric Acorn, Poetry Ireland Review Issue Number 34 (1992), The Burning Bush, Riposte, Poetry on the Lake , Silver Wyvern Anthology (Italy), Out to Lunch Anthology 2002, Poetry.com, Shamrock Haiku, Bamboo Dreams an Anthology of Haiku Poetry from Ireland, Poetry Bus 3 & 4, Outburstmagazine Issues 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 & 13, First Cut, CANCAN (Scotland) June 2013, LucidRhythms (U.S.A) ,Angle Poetry Journal, Australia (Issue 3, March 2013) The Galway Review and Turbulence Magazine (U.K.) June 2013.

Her first published work was a short story, and for this, she won the Prudential Young Irish Writers’ Award 1990. Her humorous sketches were broadcast on Mike Murphy’s Arts Show on RTE Radio 1. She was one of the youngest members of the Dublin Writers’ Workshop, and after that went on to found Chocolate Sundaes at La Cave with William Kennedy and Christopher Daybell in the mid nineties. She was the winner of the Gerard Manley Hopkin’s Poetry Award 1991 and took the overall prize for poetry in the 1998 Clothesline Writers’ Festival. Two poems highly commended by Al Alvarez, were published in The Silver Wyvern Anthology in Italy, 2001.

Kate edited and published posthumously, the selected poems of her good friend Christopher Daybell, The Man With The Crowded Eye (2001).

She is an accomplished performer and respected on the open mike circuit. She wrote about her experiences in Poetry Ireland Review Magazine (2003), and has read in New York and Rome. She recited in The Palace Bar 2009 to honour Patrick Kavanagh; in 2010 she did a reading/stand up routine, for GLÓR, International Bar. She was one of the poets from Dublin’s lunchtime reading series organised through Bank of Ireland’s Arts Centre and featuring contemporary poetry in Ireland today. The OUT TO LUNCH anthology (2002) featured the works of “…young, emerging poets like Paul Grattan, Conor O’Callaghan, Kate O’Shea, and Enda Wyley.”

‘Through the blossom-gate’ by C. Murray

August 10th, 2013

Through the blossom-gate,

and quite before the acid leaf unfurls into its meaning—

we are subjected to the play of light
working on our necessity to speak out

into a flowering. It is not yet warm —
already the sun is playing at dragging up

and displaying those unwanted words
elucidatory and garish in their babblement

it is almost necessary to cut them at their source
that well-spring is a tree-wounded-gash,

the birds disagree in their illuminatory chatter
as they may—
casting their circumspections to the breeze.

Through the blossom-gate is © Christine Murray first published in Southword Journal (Munster Literature Centre). Through the blossom-gate was published in my first collection of poetry, Cycles. (Lapwing Publications, Belfast)

Poems by Rosemarie Rowley

August 3rd, 2013

ALL’S FAIR IN LOVE AND WAR

I have not been keeping a ledger or account book
Of double entries, for the cost and price
Is not reckoned in the way you look
Or what you said, in whatever form or guise
I’ll never know your motives or intentions
Whether you acted blindly or on trust
But your suspicion of all engines and inventions
Does not bury the lost meaning, or let rust

The iron will, the gold enamelling –
Byzantine portraits in detail are enthralling
And with the years there comes the mellowing
Of my survivor’s guilt, the clarity of my calling
It was not fair, but lust and beauty
Caused the raid, and not excise on love’s duty.

© Rosemarie Rowley 2012

A RING TINGLE OF FEAR IN GOLDENBRIDGE ORPHANAGE.

A ring tingle of fear ran around my belly
Deep in my secret folds a spark of anger flew
To where your ears had picked up jelly-
Fish stings that wanted to be blue
It raced back to the womb of your un-desiring
Self where, abandoned, you brindled in your edge
Of razor sharp innuendo which was firing
Your awestruck envy of a child’s winter knowledge
Your long arm bent my back, a spancel
Till it almost broke with the weight of zealous
Might that needs exorcism in a chancel
To make a penitent nun like you jealous

So clapped my eyes and ears that were burning
As you roasted me on the spit your ire was turning.

ALL THIS DOING GOOD IS VERY CATHOLIC

He said as he sat at the wrought-iron utility desk
Beside the window whose frame was too large
You’ll get over me, you will risk
The transfer of love from the office to the barge
Of the old canal of desiring in my Dutch hometown
For we knew little, who were the divine elect
But that the balance of justice He wore in his crown
Of thorns on his head hurt, yet He was not perfect
But jealous of the worship of other Gods
He admits Himself, he is staff and rod
Knew Eve’s peccadillo and Adam’s pelf.
Everything ordained, the elect will be saved
Some go to Hell on the path you have paved
With good intentions, but lacking in free will
I see your progress in my view from the hill.

Rosemarie Rowley has written extensively in form: Flight into Reality (1989) is the longest original work in terza rima in English, reprinted 2010 and now available on CD. She has also written in rhyme royal and rhyming couplets. She has four times won the Epic award in the Scottish International Open Poetry Competition. Her books in print are: The Sea of Affliction (1987,one of the first works in ecofeminism, reprinted 2010, and Hot Cinquefoil Star, (2002) (which contains The Puzzle Factory a crown of sonnets and Letter to Kathleen Raine in rhyming couplets). Her most recent book is In Memory of Her (2004, 2008) which includes Betrayal into Origin – Dancing & Revolution in the Sixties (an 80 stanza poem in decima rima (ten line rhyme) and The Wake of Wonder (a regular sonnet sequence) and many other sonnets; all books, except her first, The Broken Pledge (1985, Martello) published by Rowan Tree Ireland Press, Dublin.

In 2003, she co-edited, with town planner John Haughton, an anthology of tree poems, Seeing the Wood and the Trees (Rowan Tree Press with Cairde na Coille)

Rosemarie has given papers for academic conferences in the Universities of Galway and Limerick and the Clinton Institute (UCD) in Ireland, in Bath, Edinburgh, St. Andrews’ and Stirling, Louisville, Sarasota and Atlanta Universities in the USA. in the UK, and in Prague, Venice, Paris ,and Valladolid on the European mainland. She has been active in the green movement in Ireland and in the Irish Byron Society and worked for a time in the European institutions in Europe.

Rosemarie has degrees in Irish and English Literature, and philosophy from Trinity College Dublin, an M.Litt on the nature poet Patrick Kavanagh, and a diploma in psychology from NUI.