Venue: An Díseart
Date: Sunday 20 November 2022
Time: 14.30 – 15.30 IST/GMT
Tickets: Entry is free, places are limited so book ahead
In this very special event to celebrate the publication by Poetry Ireland of Vital Signs, Poems of Illness and Healing, we will hear from editor Martin Dyar, Kerrie O Brien, Annemarie Ni Churreain, and Seán Hewitt.
Chaired by local GP Dr Peadar O Fionnain, the event will explore, in the words of the President of Ireland, poems that “enable us to understand what it means to experience being fully human in all its complexity, fragility, and diversity”.
President Higgins, who wrote the foreword to the collection, goes on to say that Vital Signs presents us with “sudden moments of joy and delirium, of regrets encountered too late, of loss and love, of fear and hope, of healing and death, of nature and science” An event not to be missed!
Vital Signs will be available to purchase after the event.
Martin Dyar grew up in Swinford, County Mayo. His first book of poems, Maiden Names (Arlen House), was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize. A recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, he has written a play, Tom Loves a Lord, about the life of the poet Thomas Moore, and, in collaboration with the composer Ryan Molloy, a poetry song cycle titled Buaine na Gaoithe. He has held creative writing fellowships at the University of Iowa and at the University of Limerick. He teaches in the School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin.
Kerrie O’Brien is a poet from Dublin. Her debut collection of poetry, Illuminate, was published by Salmon Poetry in October 2016 and was made possible by a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. Her poetry has featured in Cyphers, The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, RTE Arena, Sunday Miscellany, The RTE Bookshow, The Irish Examiner and Southword and she was read at literary festivals around the world. For more visit www.kerrieobrien.com
ANNEMARIE NÍ CHURREÁIN is a poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her books include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017), Town (The Salvage Press, 2018) and The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021).
She is a recipient of the Arts Council Next Generation Artist Award and a co-recipient of The Markievicz Award. Of her work The Los Angeles Review of Books states “that Ní Churreáin can condense the prototypical life of a young Irish woman into half a page while sustaining the poem’s impact is testament to her ability as a storyteller, the vividness of her language, and the universality of the portraits she is painting…”.
The Yale Review reports that she “often captures a whole world of cultural and historical implications in a single, simple, but metaphorically rich image”. Ní Churreáin is a former literature fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany, Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris and The Jack Kerouac House of Orlando. Ní Churreáin’ is the 2022 Decade of Centenaries Poet in Residence with Donegal County Council Archives Service.
Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, which was awarded the Laurel Prize, and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. He is the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award, the Resurgence Prize, and an Eric Gregory Award. Hewitt is a book critic for the Irish Times and teaches Modern British and Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin