A Poetry Jukebox Curation
'Star Gazing'
Iggy McGivern: The Great Telescope in Birr
Iggy McGovern has published three collections of poetry with Dedalus Press –The King of Suburbia (2005), Safe House (2010) and The Eyes of Isaac Newton (2017). His verse biography of Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, A Mystic Dream of 4 (2013), is published by Quaternia Press. Awards include The Hennessy Award for Poetry and The Glen Dimplex New Writers Award for Poetry. He curated the anthology 20|12: Twenty Irish Poets Respond to Science in Twelve Lines (Dedalus/Quaternia 2012).
Lorraine Carey: Stargazing
Lorraine Carey’s poetry is widely anthologised and published in journals including Poetry Ireland Review, Abridged, Eunoia Review, Orbis, Prole, The High Window, Ink Sweat &Tears, One Hand Clapping, Smithereens and The Honest Ulsterman among others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her debut collection is From Doll House Windows (Revival Press)
John O'Donnell : Watching Stars
John O’Donnell’s work has been published and broadcast widely in Ireland and abroad. He has published four poetry collections, the latest of which is Sunlight: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2018). Prizes for poetry include the Irish National Poetry Prize, the Ireland Funds Prize and the Hennessy Award for Poetry.
Fiction publications include Counterparts (The Stinging Fly), Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction, the Sunday Tribune, the Sunday Independent, The Stinging Fly, Books Ireland and the Irish Times (online), and RTE’s The Book On One. Awards include the Hennessy Award for Emerging Fiction and Cuirt Festival of Literature New Writing Prize for Fiction. His first collection of short stories Almost the Same Blue (Doire Press) was nominated in the Irish Times as one of the Best Fiction Debuts of 2020, and one of the Books of the Year in the Sunday Independent. He lives and works in Dublin.
Jamie Field : Cusp
Jamie Field is studying for a MA in Poetry at Queens University Belfast. He is deaf.
Mari Maxwell: Lunar Phase
Mari Maxwell’s work features in Northern Ireland’s Light Theatre Company’s Dickens Festival 2020; Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, December 2020; Pendemic.ie; Boyne Berries 28 The Covid Issue; Honest Ulsterman; Headstuff.org; Her Other Language, an anthology with Women’s Aid Northern Ireland; Libartes.net (translated to Serbian); Healing Words Exhibition, London, and University College Dublin’s Poetry Wall in 2018 & 2019. Her work features online and in print in Ireland, USA, India, Brazil, Australia and Serbia. She is a 2019-2020 Words Ireland/Mayo County Council mentee and former member of the Irish Writers Centre’s inaugural XBorders project.
Ann-Marie Foster: Star Date Now
“As a broadcast journalist, I write all the time but it’s fact, not fiction and no adjectives are allowed. So, in my spare time I write poetry, plays and short stories and have had some poems and a short play published. I was also fortunate to win The James Kilfedder Memorial Prize via North Down Borough Council, as it was then. I use creative writing as an escape – the same way I use tap-dancing lessons. I live in Bangor and have an understanding family and two cats.”
Jean O'Brien: Hotter Stars Burn Blue
Jean O’Brien’s sixth collection Stars Burn Regardless is published by Salmon Poetry in September 2021. She is a prize winning poet and was awarded a Catherine & Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship in 2017/18, she currently tutors in creative writing/poetry.
Martin Meyler: The Sky in Winter
“I’m a visual artist, professionally, working as an educator in the voluntary sector in Tallaght, Dublin. I’ve also been writing for a number of years.
I’ve been published in The Moth, and had three pieces included in the Uplift Project which displayed poems alongside election posters in the same year. I’ve read at two Culture Night events in the NLI and at the Fringe Festival of Mountains To The Sea in 2013. I’ve taken part in several workshops run by Yvonne Cullen and in 2019 was a participant in The Redline Festival Writing Workshop run by Lisa Harding, which included readings, and had three pieces in a chapbook brought out in February of last year. I also wrote the ensemble piece we performed as a group at the festival. And I’d a poem called ‘Water’ in the December 2020 edition of The Cormorant broadsheet.”
Adam Trodd: The Night of the Comet
Adam Trodd’s writing has appeared in publications such as Banshee, Crannóg and The Caterpillar. He has been shortlisted for the Cúirt Prize and won the 2017 Benedict Kiely Short Story Competition. He was one of the selected writers for the XBorders project. He is on the Splonk editorial team.
Photo: Malachi O’Doherty
Paul McCarrick: Your Fault in the Lives of Others
Paul McCarrick’s poetry has been published in The Ogham Stone, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, and elsewhere. He was selected to take part in the 2019 Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. He is currently completing his first collection.
Maria Isakova Bennett: 59th Man
Maria Isakova Bennett is writer-in-residence for Mersey Care, NHS, and tutor for projects in Liverpool. She creates the limited edition hand-stitched poetry journal, Coast to Coast to Coast, collaborating with poets in the UK and Ireland. In 2020, Maria created mira, a journal and exhibition with John Glenday. Maria has won and been placed in many competitions and has three publications: …an ache in each welcoming kiss, 2019; All of the
Marion Clarke : Café, Le Soir
Marion Clarke is a writer and artist from Warrenpoint, County Down. She particularly enjoys studying and writing short form poetry, but occasionally writes longer stuff.
Jess McKinney - On the Subject of Virginia Woolf
Jess Mc Kinney is a poet from Inishowen Donegal, who has recently completed her MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, where she was awarded the Irish Chair of Poetry Student Award 2020. Since graduating she was awarded an artist bursary from Donegal County Council to support the writing and publication of her first pamphlet. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Abridged, and The Open Ear, with forthcoming poetry in SAND Journal and The Moth.
Carole Farnan: Stephan Hawking's Party
Carole Farnan is a Belfast-based writer whose work has been published in several CAP anthologies, Washing Windows? (Arlen Press); One Hundred Memories; The Honest Ulsterman; A New Ulster; Pendemic and other platforms.
Ciarán O'Rourke: Black Hole
Ciarán has won the Cúirt New Irish Writing Award, the Westport Poetry Prize, and the Fish Poetry Prize. His first collection, The Buried Breath, was published by Irish Pages Press in 2018. His second collection is due in 2021. He lives in Leitrim.
Jen Herron: Celestial Self
Jen Herron is a teacher and writer from Larne, Northern Ireland.
Mark Granier: How Far is Outer Space?
Mark Granier’s poems have appeared in various outlets in Ireland and the UK over the years, including The New Statesman, Poetry Ireland Review, The TLS, Poetry Review and, recently, Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Write Where We Are NOW’ Covid 19 project for Manchester University. His work has also been broadcast on RTE. Prizes and awards include the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize and two Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowships. His fifth collection, Ghostlight: New & Selected Poems, was published by Salmon Poetry in May 2017.
Ross Thompson : Adrasteia
Ross Thompson is a poet from Bangor, County Down. His work has featured in a wide range of international journals and publications, and he has read on television and radio. His debut poetry collection Threading The Light is published by Dedalus Press. In 2020, he wrote and curated A Silent War, a collaborative audio project in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that raised funds for Cruse Bereavement Care. He is currently working on a variety of projects including a second collection, The Coming Dark, and a series of poems inspired by the history of space travel.
Claudine Toutoungi: Landing
Claudine Toutoungi’s debut collection Smoothie (2017) and her second collection Two Tongues (2020) are published by Carcanet Press. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, PN Review, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Spectator, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, The Financial Times and elsewhere. Claudine’s plays Bit Part and Slipping ran at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, and Slipping featured in New York’s Lark Play Centre’s HotINK series and was a Best Play Finalist in the 2015 Audio Drama Awards. She has written multiple other audio dramas for BBC Radio including Deliverers, This Is Your Country Now Too: Mira, seasons of Home Front, the comedy drama series The Inheritors, and several dramatizations.
Shannon Kuta Kelly: Soyuz 11
Shannon Kuta Kelly’s work has appeared in the Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, the London Magazine, Body Prague, and in conjunction with the Romanian Embassy in Dublin. She is a current PhD student at Queens University Belfast.