Life
b. London; writer in residence at QUB, 1991, and at Cork, 1996; editor of the Irish News Poetry Club; collections incl. Thinking of Skins (1993); Best China Sky (1995); The Miracle Diet (1998), Holding Pattern (1998); writes "Poem of the Week" column in the Guardian., often featuring Irish poets of the past and present - such as Francis Ledwidge"s lament for the 1916 leaders in April 2009 and another poem by him on 28 Aug. 2023.
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Works
Poetry collections Thinking of Skins: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe 1993); ed., Elizabeth Bartlett, Two Women Dancing: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe 1995), 224pp.; Best China Sky (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1995), 80pp.; The Miracle Diet (Bloodaxe 1998), 62pp., ill. Viv Quillin; Holding Pattern (Belfast: Blackstaff 1998), 120pp. [9 collections to 2023.]
Miscellaneous, ‘Anthologising the Archipelago’ in Irish Review, 14 (Autumn 1993), pp.94-99 [Sect. I of review article on The Field Day Anthology to Irish Literature, 1991; with Patrick Crotty, pp.94-104]; review of Aidin Higgins, Lions of the Grunewald, in Fortnight, 327 (April 1994), p.48; review of Emma Donoghue, Stir-Fry, in Summer Books, with Aug. 1994 [Fortnight 330]. p.8; ‘Back to Double-Standards’, full-page review of Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls, Recognition, rejection and the woman poet (Viking 1995), in Times Literary Supplement, 13.10. 1995; p.29 [‘Poetry’].
New Poems, “Forstie Lullaby”; “Glue-Groove on University Square”; “Song of the Non-Existent”; “The Possible Worlds”; “Atlantis”; “Cloachinea”, in Fortnight, 327 (April 1994), p.49.
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Commentary
Mary O’Donnell, review of Thinking of Skins, Summer Books, with Aug. 1994 [Fortnight 330]. p.7; also noticed in Books Ireland (Nov. 1995) citing lines on England: ‘It became so old,/it turned into a baby./Teach it language, world.’
Fred Johnston, review of Holding Pattern, in Books Ireland (April 1999), p.94: ‘Wariness, but never weariness, sets in, as the incomer strives to come to terms with the consequences of her new choice of “home” and to oput the claims of this environment agaisnt those of the “somewhere else”she might have known or imagined’; reviewer quotes: ‘To circle hopefully, never admitting/Before this moment (and not really now)/Which self, which well-embroidered plot, which mainland,/Which graveyard, I was travelling with my back to.’
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Quotations
‘Back to Double-Standards’ review of Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls (Viking 1995), in Times Literary Supplement (13 Oct 1995), p.29, finds the book ‘slanted towards bad poets and easy targets.’
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