Thursday, February 16, on Zoom.

A line-up of nine wonderful poets from Ireland (North and South) entertained, moved and kept a large virtual audience spellbound with memorable words and voices.

It is so special to hear poets read their work aloud, often giving a bit of fascinating background to how they came to write each poem.

Maurice Devitt, Linda McKenna, Maureen Boyle, Geraldine Mitchell, Rosie Johnston, Noel Duffy, Catherine Phil MacCarthy, Geraldine O’Kane and Eithne Hand beautifully projected their poetic skill and their enthusiasm, clearly enjoying sharing the reading with poets they admired but in some cases had not met or read with before.

As one member of the audience, herself a poet, said afterwards, “I have seldom heard, in one evening, so many poems I could enjoy and relate to.”

Below are brief bios of the poets and the titles and publishers of their books, if you wish to buy them. If you have any problems with that, email me irena@in-words.co.uk and I’ll put you in touch with the authors themselves.

Maureen Boyle lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She began writing as a child in Sion Mills, County Tyrone, winning a UNESCO medal for a book of poems in 1979 at the age of eighteen. She studied in Trinity College, Dublin and in 2005 was awarded a Masters in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. She has won various awards including the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize, the Strokestown International Poetry Prize and the Fish Short Memoir Prize. She has received support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in the form of Individual Arts, ACES and Travel Awards. She was awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Inaugural Travel Bursary in 2017 to research the stay of John Donne’s wife, Ann More, on the Isle of Wight in 1611. This resulted in a limited edition pamphlet ‘The Nunwell Letter’ appearing in June 2019. Some of her work has been translated into German and Dutch. The Work of a Winter, her debut collection of poetry, was launched in December 2017, and is currently in its second edition. The collection was shortlisted for the 2019 Shine/Strong Award. Strabane, a long poem, appeared in 2020. Her second full collection, The Last Spring of the World was published in June 2022 with Arlen House, Dublin.

Maurice Devitt is a previous winner of the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland, Bangor and Poems for Patience competitions, was a featured poet at the Poets in Transylvania Festival in 2015 and a guest speaker at the John Berryman Centenary Conference in both Dublin and Minneapolis. His poems have been published widely and he has been nominated for Pushcart, Forward and Best of the Net prizes. His Pushcart-nominated poem, ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015. He is curator of the ‘Irish Centre for Poetry Studies’ site and in 2018 published his debut collection, Growing Up in Colour with Doire Press, who will also publish his new collection, Some of These Stories are True, in 2023.

Noel Duffy was born in Dublin. He has published four collections of poetry to date, most recently Street Light Amber, a narrative sequence of love poems set in his native city. He has twice been a recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary for Literature and more recently he was awarded the Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. He lives in Dublin’s dockland district.

Eithne Hand is a writer, radio and theatre producer from Greystones, Co Wicklow in Ireland. In 2021 she was an Artist in Residence at the Hawk’s Well Theatre in Sligo. Her first poetry collection Fox Trousers was launched by Salmon Poetry in February 2021 and her second collection will be published in spring 2024.

Rosie Johnston’s four poetry books are published by Lapwing Publications in Belfast, most recently Six-Count Jive in 2019, with a fifth Off the Map due for publication in 2023. Her poems have appeared in Snakeskin, The Phare, London Grip, Culture NI, FourxFour, The Honest Ulsterman, Mary Evans Picture Library’s Poems and Pictures blog, Words for the Wild. Her poetry is anthologised by Live Canon, Arlen House, OneWorld’s Places of Poetry anthology, Fevers of the Mind and American Writers Review. She reads her poetry widely, most recently at Faversham and Gloucester Poetry Festivals. rosiejohnstonwrites.com

Geraldine Mitchell is a Dublin-born poet and writer who has been living on the Co Mayo coast for several years, after a career combining teaching and freelance journalism in France and Spain. Her fourth collection of poems, Mute/Unmute, was published in 2020. Geraldine is a Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award winner and was runner-up in the 2021 Troubadour International Poetry Competition. Her previous collections are Mountains for Breakfast (2017), Of Birds and Bones (2014) and World Without Maps (2011). She is published by Arlen House. Geraldine has also written two novels for young readers and a biography. Her website: www.geraldinemitchell.net

Linda McKenna’s debut poetry collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, was published by Doire Press in 2020. The title poem won the An Post/Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year. She won the Seamus Heaney Award for new writing in 2018. She has had poems published, or forthcoming in, among others, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, The North, Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, Crannóg, Acumen, Atrium, One, The Stony Thursday Book, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Skylight 47, The High Window, Raceme as well as on the Mary Evans Library Poems and Pictures Blog. She is from County Dublin but lives in Downpatrick, County Down and is working on her second collection which will be published by Doire Press next year.

Catherine Phil MacCarthy was born in Co. Limerick, Ireland and has lived in Dublin for over thirty years. She has published five collections of poetry including Daughters of the House (2019), and The Invisible Threshold (2012), both with Dedalus Press Dublin. She is a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review (1998/99). She received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry from the University of St Thomas, St Paul, Minnesota, in 2014. In 2022, she was the recipient of Varuna’s International Writer Exchange and awarded a month-long residency at Varuna, the National Writers’ House, NSW, Australia, to work on her forthcoming collection, Catching Sight.

Geraldine O’Kane is Northern Irish poet, writing facilitator and mental health advocate. Her debut poetry collection Unsafe, explores her working-class background and the trauma of the everyday. The collection navigates the safety found in writing as it much as it does the unsafe spaces we occupy. Unsafe was published by Salmon Poetry in 2021. Geraldine is working on her second collection, Broken.

Events

Tuesday May 14, 7pm on Zoom:

Voices from the Blog – in collaboration with Mary Evans Picture Library.

Readings by Natan Barreto, David Bottomley, Wendy French, Sue Hubbard, Maggie MacKay, Marion McCready, Hugh McMillan and Jill Sharp.

Remembering Gill Stoker.

A great line-up for this small tribute to Gill, who founded and curated the Poems and Pictures Blog for the Picture Library, attracting and encouraging poets to ‘match’ poems with pictures from the Library’s huge collection.

Gill and I collaborated on a number of events in the past, both virtual and in person, and I hope to use this format a few more times – there are so many poets who want to celebrate Gill and her achievement (one of many). She was so helpful, enthusiastic, talented and knowledgeable, and we miss her terribly.

If you wish to attend the reading, please email me, irena@in-words.co.uk, and I will send you a Zoom invitation, as well as further information, nearer the time.

Natan Barreto was born in Salvador, Brazil. He has lived in Rio, Paris, Rome, and, since 1992, in London, where he works as a primary school teacher. He is the author of seven collections of poetry in Portuguese. Fluent in many languages, he has also published a novel and a volume of translations from French of work by Madagascan writer Jean-Joseph Rabearivel.

David Bottomley is an award-winning poet, playwright and librettist with a passion for environmental and ecological conservation. His play Waterton’s Wild Menagerie was a finalist of the Nick Darke Award; Britain for Breakfast, finalist Enter Stage Write Award and Limboland, finalist at Herts and Essex Playwriting Festival. His plays have been performed at Edinburgh, Manchester, San Diego Fringe Festivals, Birmingham and London theatres. He works nationally and internationally with composers to set his writing to music. He was commissioned by the charity Rising Tides to write the environmental play King Neptune and the Mermaid. David recently obtained an MA in Opera Making and Writing at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, for which he was commissioned to write the opera Lanternfish.

Wendy French has three collections of poetry published: Splintering the Dark (Rockingham Press, 2005), surely you know this (Tall Lighthouse, 2009), and Thinks Itself A Hawk (Hippocrates Press, 2016), the latter resulting from her time as Poet in Residence at the UCH Macmillan Cancer Centre, 2014-2015. She was joint editor with Dilys Wood of Fanfare (Second Light, 2015), a book of poems written by women poets, and also co-edited The Hippocrates Book of the Heart (Hippocrates Press, 2017) with Prof Michael Hulse and Prof Donald Singer. She won the Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Prize (NHS section) in 2010 and was awarded second prize in 2011. Her collaboration with Jane Kirwan resulted in the book Born in the NHS (Hippocrates Press, 2013). She has judged or co-judged three major poetry competitions: the Torbay International Competition, the Torriano Competition and the Tongues and Grooves 10-year celebration competition, as well as the Hippocrates International Poetry Competition for poems relating to medicine or the body. For the past twenty years she has facilitated creative writing in healthcare settings, having finished her formal teaching career as head of the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital School in 2003.

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic, with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She is twice winner of the London Writers Competition, with a third prize in the National Poetry Competition. Her publications include Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station, The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), and The Idea of Islands (Occasional Press). Swimming to Albania, her fourth collection, was published by Salmon Press in 2021, and Pushkin Press published her fourth novel Flatlands in 2023. Twenty of her poems were included in An Anthology: Carcanet 2000. Her poetry has been recorded for The Poetry Sound Archive, read on Poetry Please, The Verb and Front Row, and appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, as well as in The Irish Times and The Observer. She has published a collection of short stories, Rothko’s Red (Salt), and two novels, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and Girl in White (Cinnamon Press), for which she received a major Arts Council Award. Her third novel, Rainsongs, was published in 2018 to great critical acclaim from The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent and The Jewish Chronicle, among many others. As an art critic she has written regularly for many leading newspapers and art magazines. Her selected art writings, Adventures in Art, are published by Other Criteria. As The Poetry Society’s only Public Art Poet, she was responsible for London’s largest public art poem, ‘Eurydice’, in the IMAX tunnel at Waterloo, commissioned as part of the South Bank regeneration.

A retired Scottish support teacher for young people with additional needs, Maggie MacKay took up her writing again and began a thrilling new life. After studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, her pamphlet The Heart of the Run (Picaroon Poetry 2018) with Kate Garrett was followed by her debut collection A West Coast Psalter (Kelsey Books 2021). In 2020 her poem ‘How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt’ was awarded a place in the Poetry Archive’s WordView permanent collection and was a runner up in The Liverpool Prize. Steve Cawte at Impspired Press published her second collection The Babel of Human Travel in November 2022. She reviews poetry collections and pamphlets at The Friday Poem (https://thefridaypoem.com). Maggie loves a good malt and cool jazz as much as daydreaming on the sofa with Hattie, her marvellous rescue greyhound.

Marion McCready lives in Argyll. Her poems have been published widely including in Poetry (Chicago), Edinburgh Review, The Glasgow Herald and have appeared in multiple anthologies. Her pamphlet collection Vintage Sea was published by Calder Wood Press (2011). She is the winner of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and the author of two poetry collections from Eyewear Publishing: Tree Language (2014) and Madame Ecosse (2017). Her most recent collection, Look to the Crocus, was published by Shoestring Press in 2023.

Hugh McMillan is a well published, anthologised and broadcast poet, writer and performer who lives in South West Scotland. His last collection Haphazardly in the Starless Night was published by Luath Press in 2021 and Diverted to Split, his latest, is due out in summer 2024. In 2021 he was appointed editor of the Scottish Poetry Library’s anthology ‘Best Scottish Poems’ and was also chosen to be a Saltire Society judge for Best Scottish Poetry Collection of the Year. His cult classic ‘McMillan’s Galloway’ was reprinted in paperback form in May 2023, and ‘Whit If’, his Scottish History poems are to be reprinted in April 2024. His website is at https://www.hughmcmillanwriter.co.uk/

Jill Sharp has worked as a tutor with the Open University and has also taught excluded teenagers. Her poetry has been published in many magazines including Acumen, Envoi, The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, Mslexia, Prole, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand, and Under the Radar. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, most recently Pale Fire (Frogmore Press) and Contemporary Gothic Verse (Emma Press), as well as online at And Other Poems, Ink, Sweat and Tears and London Grip. Her pamphlet Ye gods was published by Indigo Dreams (2015), and she was one of six poets in Vindication, an anthology from Arachne Press (2018). Her poem ‘Cemetery crow’ was placed joint-second in the 2020 Keats-Shelley Prize. Jill was a founder member of Swindon’s BlueGate Poets, and she has run regular writing workshops at the Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate.