Offaly poet's work chosen for major new anthology
TULLAMORE poet Richard Brennan performed one of his own poems at the launch of Chasing Shadows, an anthology of poetry, in Edgeworthstown, Co Longford during Heritage Week.
Richard's poem was selected by nationally and internationally renowned poet Noel Monahan from over 700 poems.
Chasing Shadows features work from acclaimed national and international poets and is a miscellany of poetry published by Lapwing, under the watchful eyes of Mary Carleton Reynolds, creative Ireland Longford, Shelley Corcoran, compiler, and Noel Monahan, editor, who has devoted his years to facilitating Creative Writing in the Midlands.
The poems in Chasing Shadows were selected from the huge entry of hundreds from Ireland to India. The poems run to 102 pages and the book has succinct biographies of the contributors at the back.
Chasing Shadows was launched last Friday evening, August 19 in Edgeworthstown’s green just across from the Maria Edgeworth Centre. Twenty-eight contributing poets read for the occasion.
Strad Band complemented the readings and the musicians included Aoibhinn Lynch, All Ireland winner on the button accordion. Eleven-year-old step dancer Cormac Lynch stole the show with his very fancy footwork.
Along with Tullamore writer Richard Brennan, poets featured in the miscellany include well established names like Irish-Australian Nathanael O’Reilly, Joan McBreen, Patrick Deeley and John Liddy as well as other younger poets making their mark these days David Fallon and S.J. Delaney.
Editor Monahan read and re-read all submitted poems blind and chose the ones best exemplifying for him the music of what happens within the poems.
Forty-six contributors are female and here is Sally Martin’s “Young Love”:
“His fingers move fast, gracefully even
as if dancing across the keypad of his phone . . .running . . .
the girl . . .who’s smiling back . . .
they kiss oblivious to all”.
Pauline Flood’s “Disappearing Nature!” is at once a two-page lament, a “rage against” and a poem of celebratory couplets in fourteeners and more, rhyming, off-rhyming, with some consonance, against the disappearance of endangered species, the “curlew, quail and corncrake . . .the hare . . .and rabbit, too, diminishing their time in fields of clover”.