LORNA SHAUGHNESSY has published four poetry collections, Torching the Brown River, Witness Trees, Anchored and Lark Water (Salmon Poetry) and a chapbook, Song of the Forgotten Shulamite (Lapwing). She lectures in Hispanic Studies in NUI Galway, translates Galician, Spanish and Latin American poetry, and co-edited A Different Eden: Ecopoetry from Ireland and Galicia (Dedalus Press, 2021). In 2018 she was awarded an Artist’s Bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland and in 2021 an ‘Agility Award’ to produce a short poetry film based on her work.  https://lornashaughnessy.com/

Maeve O'Sullivan: Let’s start at the beginning: when, how and why did your interest in writing poetry start?

Lorna Shaughnessy: I was a late starter, into my 30s. I had studied English and Spanish for my degree and written a PhD on Spanish Poetry of the 1920s and 30s, so I had a keen interest in poetry but probably had an overdeveloped ‘internal critic’. I think I started writing poetry in response to overwhelming experiences/experiences outside my comfort zones. The first was the experience of living in Nigeria in 1995-96, where I tried to record my impressions in poems but the writing didn’t gel. In hindsight I wasn’t letting the overwhelming nature of the experience come out in the poems, I was trying to control my response to it; in that sense it was a missed opportunity. This was followed in 1997-8 by the experience of pregnancy. I suspect that the physical changes happening allowed me to see myself differently in many ways. It is a transformative experience, and helped me muzzle that inner critical voice and take risks. What risk could be bigger than bringing a child into the world?

I first published poems in a lovely Galway magazine, Crannóg (still going). In 2005, the wonderful Dennis Greig of Lapwing in Belfast published a ‘Chapbook’, Song of the Forgotten Shulamite. Then in 2008 my first collection Torching the Brown River came out with Salmon. In many ways the poems in Torching feel like they were written by someone else, but I can see threads there that have carried on – poems about family, ekphrastic poems, illness (my own cancer in 2007), Classical Myth which I came late to (‘Antigone’, the Jean McConville poem and ‘Euripides Writes to his Pupil’, a short poem that grew and grew); and also poems set in Belfast in the 60s and 70s, the political backdrop to my childhood and teens.

MOS: As you mentioned, your first full collection was Torching the Brown River (2008, Salmon Poetry), but you had already completed translations from the Spanish of collections by two other poets. I was wondering about the impact that translating these books had on your own work. You’re also the Director of Crosswinds, a collaboration between Irish and Galician poets and translators. Linking in with other writers from your own and other cultures is clearly important to you: why is that and how does it impact your work?

LS: This is a question I never know how to answer. I think it’s really difficult to see the impact of our readings in our own work, particularly readings in another language. It is important to me as a poet (and a human being) to read work from other cultures and languages. I think it’s essential to be open to other ways of seeing the world, other ways of expressing our place in it. I find it hard to pin down concrete examples of where and how the writers I’ve translated may have influenced my own work. I know in Spanish language poetry that I’m often attracted to poets who use incredibly free association in their work, a kind of imaginative exuberance that I envy – I don’t think my own work has the same degree of unapologetic subjectivity.

MOS: Torching the Brown River is very assured for a first collection. Although it covers a wide range of themes and locations, there isn’t the ‘pick ‘n’ mix’ tendency that we sometimes find in debuts. As with all of your books, we find original and memorable imagery, effective use of figures of speech and great control of the line, whether short, medium or long. It’s as if you arrived as a fully-formed poet, can you comment on that?

LS: Only to say that I had read a lot of poetry before I started writing, and had probably absorbed a lot of the formal options available to me. I also played a lot of music when I was younger, and the auditory/sonic effects of language are very important to me, especially rhythm, whether measured or fractured.

MOS: Torching the Brown River is populated by a large ‘cast of characters’: from loved ones to acquaintances to strangers. You seem to take inspiration from the stories of others, as well as your own, of course. This includes, notably, that of Jean McConville, one of Northern Ireland’s ‘disappeared’, to whose memory your powerful poem ‘Antigone’ is dedicated. ‘The Troubles’ appear in other, later, poems, but was this the first one in which you tackled them ‘head on’, as it were and why did you decide to do this?

LS: I had grown up in Belfast and lived there until I was 25, so ‘The Troubles’ had informed my development on many levels and it would be difficult to avoid writing about something that was so profoundly a part of my childhood and adolescence. Also, the 1990s and early 2000s saw a tectonic shift politically with the Peace Process and The Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement.  It was a time of hope but also a time of looking back and reflecting on all the lost lives and trauma. It wasn’t as if the country had arrived at a utopian state of harmony – there were still lots of challenges. It was also a time of excellent investigative journalism, uncovering dreadful truths that had been swept under the carpet.  The following two collections, Witness Trees and Anchored (in particular the ‘Belfast Obituaries’ and ‘The Injured Past’ sequences, respectively) are where I explore those darker events and try to come to terms in some way with the dark legacy of those years.

MOS: Of course you draw on mythology for many other poems, do you find that using characters from myths and their stories helps to say things that you would find more difficult to say directly?

LS: Using myth and archetype in that metaphorical way can help a poem to resonate beyond the particularities of personal experience. The power of myth to resonate with audiences and readers over thousands of years - politically, psychologically and emotionally – never ceases to amaze me.

MOS: You describe, if that’s the right word, the experience of a cancer diagnosis and treatment in a number of poems towards the end of Torching the Brown River, including the trio 'The Flesh’, ‘Taliswoman’ and ‘True Aim’. Typically, you do this using a matter-of-fact tone, without self-pity, and once again using strong metaphors such as Amazons and woven dolls from Mexico. Were these poems hard to write, given the nature of the ordeal?

LS: In this particular case it may have been harder not to write them, and I suspect they were part of my recovery. When you are in the thick of medical treatments and procedures over a long period of time, notwithstanding pain and discomfort, it actually becomes very routine and ‘matter of fact’. The Amazon was a playful use of archetype for me, given that I’m all of 5’ 2’’. Like the Amazons, I had my right breast removed. For them, it was to increase the speed and of their use of bow and arrow; in my case, to remove a tumour. The little Mexican dolls were a gift from a Mexican friend and poet, Pura López Colomé, who had experienced life-threatening illness herself, and they became companions I took to hospital with me, my ‘taliswomen’.

MOS: You often employ beautiful images from nature in your work, indeed three of your four book titles allude to the natural world. You told me that you use imagery from nature as metaphor rather than having nature as a theme per se – could you expand on this please?

LS: With the possible exception of some early poems, (‘Crossbeams’ in Torching the Brown River), I don’t think the poems set out to ‘describe’ a natural scene. Sometimes nature is a backdrop, often a stimulus for reflection (e.g. ‘Walking the Bog Road’ and ‘Disembodied Song’ in Witness Trees). Given that I’ve been living in Co Galway for 35 years and walk a lot near bog, sea, lakes and mountains, it’s logical that the landscape has become a dominant source of imagery and metaphor in my work. I’m aware that, while my relationship with nature has on one level become politicized by the climate crisis, it is still a source of great solace at a deeper level. I am a politically aware person, and at times the deep companionship of the landscape stops me from sliding into despair.

MOS: On a related note, you co-edited, with Keith Payne and Martin Veiga,an anthology of eco-poems called A Different Eden: Ecopoetry from Ireland and Galicia (2021, Dedalus Books): what do you think it means to be an eco-poet in the 21st century?

LS: There is a long history of ‘nature poetry’ from cultures and languages all over the world. Traditionally it is poetry written in praise of nature. But this practice has inevitably been impacted by the environmental crisis we inhabit in the 21st century.

It has become increasingly difficult and problematic to write poems that only praise the natural world. Our relationship with the natural environment now includes (or should include) feelings like grief, fear and remorse, and I think there is an onus on artists inhabiting this profoundly threatened world to reflect on this – so our relationship with nature has become more complex, and I think this is reflected in the poems we gathered in the anthology.

MOS: As someone who loves to use form in poetry, I’m always curious about other poets’ relationship with poetry forms. I notice that you use them sparingly, but to great effect. You’ve included sonnets and villanelles in your collections, also the wonderful ‘Kitty’s Sestina’ in Witness Trees, and the haiku-esque sequence ‘Look Up’ in Lark Water. How do you go about matching the topic to the structure and form?

LS: Every poem has its own form, and travels in a particular way. Some of mine are more crafted than others. The form tends to emerge as I write, usually from sound; I tend to follow the sound. This has happened more in Lark Water than in any other collection, simply because I had more dedicated writing time, in residencies and as a result of an Arts Council Bursary. I was able to spend much more time with the poems and I think they benefitted formally. I like to follow sound patterns as they emerge, to amplify those and use them. If the form isn’t working, in general, then the poem won’t be clear about what it wants to do, so really it’s something essential to what the poem is doing as well as the way it does it.

I would love to work more with sonnets. I am interested in form: I love formal poetry and formal dance! I love what happens within the confines of form - the way it pushes you out of your comfort zone so much is really interesting. So it’s something I’d like to explore more.

MOS: It can be hard to end a poem well. Your endings are very well-crafted: striking and memorable, to such an extent that I smiled when I read the end of the poem ‘Uncovered’, in ‘The Injured Past’ section in Anchored: ‘Let the facts speak for themselves, perhaps? / Desert the lyric’s quest for closure, / the tyranny of the tidy, final / line?’

LS: The final line of that poem is posed as a question that I’m asking myself, specifically in the context of writing witness poetry, witness to other people’s trauma, conflict, death etc.: how appropriate is the lyric poem? The lyric poem is a very light, delicate vessel and can often be overburdened - by good intentions - by the weight of the message that it has to carry, whether that is grief or whatever. That section ‘The Injured Past’ in Anchored deals with many atrocities that occurred in mid-Ulster in the 1980s.Whatis the appropriate form for this kind of subject matter?

The tidy couplet at the end of a lyric poem is very seductive but runs the risk of being reductive, of tying things up too tidily. It’s a danger I’m aware of and I like to think that I work at trying not to close things down too much.

MOS: Following on from that, do you tend to hear the sound of the box lid clicking shut when each poem is ready, to use a phrase that I once heard quoted by Paula Meehan? Can you relate to that?

LS: Yes, but again sometimes I think it’s seductive, too easy an ending or conclusion. Just because it sounds nice and tidy and it clicks. Sometimes I like to go back and worry at it a bit and see if there’s any more meat there!

MOS: I like poems that take me outside! As a reader, there are so many poems that are set between four walls – often with a very cerebral focus - that it’s nice to be taken out for a walk every now and then, and yours do that often. They’re very elemental. Why is this important to you?

LS: I think it has to be because of where I live: I spend a lot of time walking in the landscape. These are the most beautiful months, May and June, with one set of wildflowers coming out after another. After living here for so long, I know their sequence well. So it’s there all the time: it’s a big part of my life. I need space. I work indoors, in academia, all winter and there’s a lot of desk time in summer too, so I need the release. I need to see big horizons and have space around me. To be honest, for me it’s the best way of getting back in touch with my senses as well. Walking in nature forces me to slow down, look and listen.

MOS: Many of your poems are inspired by other artists: you seem to take your inspiration from a range of sources, from Shakespeare to Peter Pan and beyond, and you also quote other writers in your books! How important is the work of other writers and artists to you, as you imagine and craft your poems?

LS: What probably inspires most of my work at this stage is other people’s work. It gets me thinking about things, gets me reflecting. I don’t think my life is particularly interesting: I think I’ve a very ordinary kind of life. So the stimulus for many poems comes from outside (nature) and also internally, as a response to what I’m reading, what I’m looking at and what I’m listening to.

I think the work of other artists, whether poetry, fiction, the visual arts or music are more and more important to my writing as I get older; more of my work is inspired by the work of others. The two Covid years were very difficult in that regard. I read lots of good poetry and fiction as well as non-fiction, but I really missed live encounters with art and theatre and music -  I missed the physicality of art. And I missed the kind of spontaneous conversations that surround every trip to a film or a play or a concert, where we reflect with friends or complete strangers on what we’ve just experienced collectively. I missed that stimulus, I was bored with myself.

MOS: You seem to take particular sustenance from the poetry of Federico García Lorca and from the paintings of artist Gerry Davies: why is that?

LS: I first read Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads when I was 16 or 17. They are poems I have included in modules I teach periodically, and even while translating them I felt the need to somehow respond to them, to enter into a kind of dialogue.  The ‘response’ poems actually came quite fast, much to my own surprise, as though those fictional voices had been there for a long time, just waiting for the opportunity to speak.

I can’t remember exactly when I saw Gerry Davies’ exhibition, ‘Burrow’ in the Galway Arts Centre, but the combination of his hyperreal style with very surreal content really blew me away, and I couldn’t not respond.

MOS: In an age where there’s quite a lot of ‘confessional’ poetry, I note that you tend to eschew this, opting instead to use extended metaphor, for example in ‘Epiphany’ in Torching the Brown River, ‘Monopoly’ and ‘Desamor’ in Witness Trees, among others.

LS: I think this is related to your last question, and my last answer. How interesting is my life? Maybe my thoughts are more interesting than my life in terms of writing about them and sharing them with other people? And what I get from other people sharing with me, and how they express their thoughts and feelings in their work? There’s a whole conversation going on between me and everyone that I’m reading. I’ve read some amazing poetry in the last year or so and, I have to say, Ocean Vuong, Natalie Díaz, Danez Smith – these young American poets who are non-binary and non-white: they’re such deep thinkers about language that I’m finding their work just fascinating. There are some wonderful new Irish poets as well, of course.

In relation to me and confessionalism, it’s more of a temperamental thing – I love Sharon Olds’ work but I can’t write like Sharon Olds. I don’t see the metaphors I use in individual poems as being specific to just one experience.

In my experience, when the term ‘confessional’ is being used in a pejorative way, it tends to be directed against particular kinds of people, whether that is gender-based or whatever. There are a lot of very good and valid reasons why people feel the need to write about their personal experiences. For example, in her 2020 collection Postcolonial Love Poem, Natalie Díaz writes about some of her experiences of growing up on a reservation. I have no access to that experience unless someone like her writes about it. There’s another Native American poet called Bonny Longsoldier, another amazing writer. It’s no accident that these poets are really radical in their approach to form.

I’m also learning a lot about the Asian-American experience from Ocean Vuong’s work, I’ve just read his new collection: it’s challenging and demanding reading, but I love the way in which he and these other poets are really making the English language work very hard to express their life experiences. And they have to because the traditional lyric poem that we’ve inherited has never expressed their reality. I think that, while many women poets of our generation have been courageous in coming out and talking about experiences as women, this next generation are being much more courageous formally, in stepping outside the tradition. I’m learning from these younger poets.

MOS: Returning to the topic of ‘The Troubles’ and your poems about remembering certain atrocities, you don’t shy away from the details of these.

LS: Back to that poem ‘Uncovered’ again and the whole issue of facts. After the Belfast Agreement, there was a lot of really good investigative journalism, lots of good documentaries, which alerted me to that detail. Also the very poignant book by David McKittrick et al, Lost Lives, which inspired the Shankill Butcher poems in Witness Trees, in the ‘Belfast Obituaries’ section. That sequence also draws on newspaper reports about the man who survived an attack by the Shankill Butchers, and another about a warning issued to a press photographer by paramilitaries not to attend the funeral of one of the gang. McKittrick’s Lost Lives cross-references the perpetrators of each crime with its victims, so you can follow this web. Lethal Allies, the book about collusion by Anne Cadwallader, was also a key source of information. The guns were really significant, that’s why they are mentioned, because they were a key piece of evidence.

How should a poet write about this stuff? Is the lyric poem an appropriate or adequate vehicle for this kind of witness, or should we just leave it to the documentary-makers? The facts have to be there. Because there had been so much collusion and so much had been hidden, I felt it was important that the facts should be respected. But is that the job of the poet? A book or documentary film may be more effective in presenting this narrative, but it was something I needed to write about and I had to find languages such as that of ballistics and fingerprinting. I also needed to write about how difficult these things are to write about.

In relation to timing, I don’t think I’ve ever written or published a poem soon after an event. Most of my poems about The Troubles in Witness Trees and Anchored are about things that happened twenty or thirty years previously. But it can be difficult to capture the complexity of such events in the moment.

MOS: In your ‘post-peace’ poems, I notice some cynicism creeping in, and some black humour, most notably in ‘Standing Ovation at The Crum’ in Anchored. Would you like to comment on this?

LS: I was absolutely gobsmacked when I attended this exhibition with my mother, in the early 2010s, at the old Crumlin Road prison which had by then been opened as a museum. It was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever experienced: they had mannequins in the 19th Century prison cells, dressed in costumes from the Bolshoi. That was weird enough, but the gift shop was unbelievable. Tee-shirts with images of barbed wire on them and a message saying ‘I’ve been to the Crum’. They were playing Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ in the gift shop, and there were posters advertising a gig by an Elvis lookalike who would be performing ‘Jailhouse Rock’. I was quite shocked. It really threw me, this commodification and the total erasure of the stuff that had gone on in the prison.

MOS: You sometimes use other voices in your poems, for example and especially in the poem sequences ‘Belfast Obituaries’ in Witness Trees, which we’ve touched on already, ‘Aulis Monologues’ in Anchored, and ‘The Birth Room’ in Lark Water. This can be refreshing in an age when many poets only talk in their own voice about their own experiences. How important was it for you to explore these voices from the past, to tell their stories?

LS: This is something that I really enjoy doing, it’s an exercise in imagination. I love theatre, and am really interested in the monologue as a form. I love exploring other voices and the relationships between them. They’re all inspired by different stories. I was a latecomer to Greek mythology and really got into it in my thirties. The first time I used it in my own work was in the poem ‘Antigone’ in Torching the Brown River, about the Jean McConville case. In my academic research, I was working on post-conflict poetry in the 1990s in Central America, particularly by women. There was a lot of soul-searching about what had happened to the women’s movement.

In 1993, I came across a collection by Nicaraguan poet Michèle Najlis, called Songs of Iphigenia. I didn’t know that story until then. It expressed the whole post-war disillusionment and what, or who, the collateral damage is in a society at war. In the Greek myth, the girl-child gets sacrificed by her father Agamemnon in order to get fair winds from Artemis to sail to Troy. It’s such a shocking story. I became fascinated by this and started writing academically about the different Hispanic versions of the Iphigenia story, and I was particularly fascinated by how the myth was used for political purposes by different writers at different times. Then at some point I got the courage to write about it myself.

MOS: At the risk of sounding corny or clichéd, do you think that we learn something from these stories as readers, in relation to history repeating itself etc.?

LS: Absolutely, and it does! That sequence of mine, ‘Aulis Monologues’, was adapted for stage in 2016, a few years after Anchored came out, and I added another eight monologues, so there are sixteen in the stage version. In one of them, after Artemis has plucked Iphigenia from the sacrificial altar and transported her magically to Taurus, she’s imagining home, or what was her home. At the time, it was in the middle of the Mediterranean migrant crisis, so it wasn’t difficult towrite about that sort of displacement and exile.

MOS: Let’s move on to your fourth and most recent collection, Lark Water, which was launched in November 2021. Like your previous three, it’s published by Salmon Poetry. In re-reading it, I was struck by the flow of the collection, how one theme seems to move effortlessly into another. In a book with over fifty poems, this is not easy to accomplish. There are no sections, but did you consciously group the work into themes?

LS: After I finished the previous collection, Anchored, in 2015, there were a few areas I knew I wanted to give more attention to in this one. For example, I wanted the poems to be more image-driven. In terms of themes, a few had already emerged, for example I had already started researching the topic of the birth-room in Tudor England and the impact of the Reformation on what happened there (I’m very interested in religious identity and the ways in which it becomes the site of tensions between the personal and the public; and also with the ways in which women’s bodies and reproductive systems so often become the battlegrounds for conflicting religious and political views of the world). My interest in the topic was spurred on by the result of the Brexit referendum, which seemed, in a bizarre and oblique way, to hark back to the Reformation and the decision to create a rift with Rome for reasons that were primarily concerned with succession and the preservation of power. I don’t know how much of that comes across in ‘The Birth Room’ monologues.  So clusters of poems were definitely emerging in that sense.

Apart from subject-matter, I quickly became aware that certain motifs were going to be important to the integrity of the collection: the lark, obviously, as well as other birds; stone was another, sometimes these collided like in the poem ‘A Body Resembles a Stone More Than a Bird’. When I started to put the collection together I initially grouped poems in those clusters, either with other poems on a similar theme, or with other poems using similar motifs or images. But the resulting structure felt quite flat. It was like striking the same chord too often, or holding the same note too long. I played around with the sequencing, so that similar chords or notes would resonate throughout, rather than in isolated sections. My two previous collections had clearly delineated sections, and I was interested in creating a different effect with this one; something more integrated and cohesive, and hopefully more musical.

MOS: You mentioned to me previously that there’s a lot about mortality in Lark Water, that it’s ‘elegiac in a broader sense’. You have quite a few tender poems about others in there, loved ones who are either unwell or who have died. I was particularly moved by ‘Dallying’, the one about your mother as a child, and by ‘Last Rite’, written just after your father’s death, and of course Lark Water is dedicated to his memory. I guess that, as we age and lose loved ones, our poetry changes. You also mentioned that creating new material was a source of consolation, could you expand on this?

LS: The ever-insightful Ruth Carr made the point that she felt the poems were in fact a kind of ‘Lark Water’ for me, that the process of writing them was as mysterious and consoling as ‘el agua de las alondras’ (water of the larks) in Lorca’s poem.

Certainly the process of writing allows us to meet ourselves on many different levels, conscious and unconscious. I knew that drawing on natural imagery would be nourishing, just as being outdoors observing nature is nourishing. It’s been such a grief-filled couple of years and we have all been surrounded by death, so I feel there is still work to be done there.

MOS: As you’ve mentioned there, the title of the collection is from Lorca’s phrase ‘water of the larks’, as rendered in your translation of his poem ‘Ballad of the Black Sorrow’. Larks and other birds appear throughout the book, but I also like the humorous opening line of the second-last poem, ‘Raucous’, in which you extol the virtues of the humble seagull as well: ‘This is not another poem about the skylark’s song’. To me that shows a true love of nature and all wildlife, not just the pretty birds and flowers. That extends into the final poem, ‘Field Lullaby’, in which a crow also features: pecking, flying, calling. The poem ends with the Kennelly-esque: ‘begin again, begin again, begin again…’ How important is it for you to maintain that hopeful note in your work?

LS: I don’t know if I’d describe this book (or any of the others) as ‘hopeful’ exactly. ‘Hope’ is a word I struggle with a bit. I think I associate it with wishful thinking, sometimes even denial. I would see myself as cautiously optimistic. I like to think that my work looks the reality of human suffering in the eye and acknowledges it. This doesn’t mean it’s hope-less, but I don’t set out to ‘maintain a hopeful note’. There are lots of poems here and in earlier collections that don’t do that. I’m more interested in meeting realities face to face than in seeking out hope.

So the final line of the collection ‘begin again, begin again…’ is a tribute to survival, to keeping-going (to paraphrase Heaney), to keep creating in the knowledge that the writing may be flawed, but that ultimately, it allows me to accommodate suffering and loss, whether my own or others’, and turn it into marks on the page which will hopefully generate their own realities for the people who read them.

MOS: In his description of the book, poet Paddy Bushe says that the poetry in the book is ‘blessed with the integrity of language and feeling that is necessary for true poetry’. I have to say that I concur with his words and feel like I can trust you as a poet to take me to interesting and meaningful places. How much trust in one’s own voice do you think this takes for a poet to reach that place?

LS: I find it difficult to talk about truth in relation to poetry because I’m suspicious of sweeping abstractions. There is a tendency (in Western poetry at least) to demand ‘truth’ of poetry, when we don’t necessarily demand that quality of other art forms. On many levels I can see why: there is an ancient tradition of the poet as seer, and in many cultures the poet would have had a public role to provide insight and somehow sift the truth from the many inauthenticities of public life. I’m deeply flattered by Paddy’s comments because I think his definition of ‘true poetry’ (and I hope I’m not putting words into his mouth here) isn’t concerned with sweeping abstractions but with the individual poet’s striving to write from the reality of their own experiences.

In terms of ‘trusting my own voice’, I don’t know if I do. I’ve never thought of writing in that way. I think of it as an exploration and there are lots of risks involved – including self-deception and a lack of authenticity. That’s something I would be aware of when I’m editing my own work and also when I’m reading others’ work. I’d be very wary of ‘trusting my own voice’ – therein lies possible complacency, self-absorption and (my greatest fear) the danger of writing the same poems over and over again. 

MOS: Thank you so much, Lorna, for sharing these fascinating insights about your poetry and your creative process so openly and articulately. And finally, what projects are you working on now?

LS: I got an Arts Council Agility Award in 2021 to collaborate with young Galway-based filmmakers Barra Convery, Daniel Keane and John Margetts on a short poetry film based on the ‘Finding Mothers’ sequence of poems in Lark Water (which, in turn, are based on J.M. Barrie’s novel, Peter Pan). This is currently in post-production and should be finished in July 2022.

The next collection will be a New and Selected Poems, scheduled for 2025.

Maeve O'Sullivan’s poetry and haikai have been widely published and anthologized. She is the author of five collections from Alba Publishing, the most recent being Wasp on the Prayer Flag (2021). Maeve leads workshops in haikai, and writes reviews and features for various journals. www.maeveosullivan.com