Clare writer wins Desmond O'Grady poetry contest
CLARE poet Niamh Twomey, with her poem ‘Airmead in the Glen’ has won the Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Competition held in The People's Museum of Limerick.
Judge Eleanor Hooker said of the winning poem that it is "a beautifully balanced poem – grief at sibling loss and the
powerful affirmation of the healing power of nature is told in the myth of Airmead."
Airmead was the Celtic goddess of healing and a member of the Tuatha de Danaan. When King Nuada loses his arm in battle, Airmead’s brother Miach fashions one of flesh. Airmead brings it to life with her restorative powers. Their father, Dian Cecht, kills Miach in a jealous rage and buries his body in the battlefield, he scatters the medicinal herbs Airmead draws up from his burial place, so that future generations may not know the curative power of plants.
Ms Twomey’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Rattle, Banshee, Local Wonders: Poems of Our Immediate Surrounds, Southword and New Irish Writing, among others.
Her work won the 2022 Trim Poetry Competition, was commended in the 2021 Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition and shortlisted in the 2021 Well Review Pamphlet Competition.
In 2020 she received an Arts Council Agility Award and a mentorship through the Munster Literature Centre. She holds an MA in creative wfrom University College Cork and is currently working on her first collection.
The memorial reading and competition is an annual event held by the Limerick Writers' Centre.
Featured readers were Jamie O'Halloran, Ciaran O'Driscoll and judge Ms Hooker.
Two highly commended poets also in attendance were Billy Fenton and Felicia McCarthy, who also read their poems. The winning poem is to be posted on www.limerickwriterscentre.com.
The Winning Poem by Niamh Twomey:
Airmead in the Glen
And so I wander bog roads, wade through lakes,
hair mingling with bladderwort,
orbit forests like a planet searching
for its moons.
My winged companions; gannets,
merlins, meadow pipits circle my
path,
flock to lift my spirits from the
mud .
I tell stories to anyone who’ll
listen;
how he could climb like a squirrel,
build like a beaver, fashion a limb.
Worms rise toward the rainfall of
my tears.
Wrens bathe in the salt pools of my
clavicles .
Bats fold in the caves of my
clothes .
A robin presses his fluttering heart
to my palm,
perches on the bough of my lifeline.
I can’t plant breath in the lungs of
the dead
but look;
cackling geese point north,
their beaks like compass needles.
At nightfall, owls
summon shapes
from the dark.