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Python, a poem for World Poetry Day
A recording of me reading my poem 'Python' to mark World Poetry Day.
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Written in the Stars
Today at 7pm in the Town Hall in Gort, I'll be reading poetry, alongside other local poets, as part of the Poetry Ireland's Poetry Day Ireland - the theme is 'Written in the Stars'.
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Submerged in Mythic Delirium
My poem, ‘Submerged’, is in issue 4.2 of Mythic Delirium, along with a variety of work, including a cover by The Crosspunk Wanderer (aka Lasse Paldanius), new stories from James Van Pelt, Daniel Ausema and Premee Mohamed, and more poetry by Virginia M Mohlere, Trent Walters, David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Mary Soon Lee and Alix Bosley. I wrote the poem in response to the discovery of HMS Terror, submerged in an Arctic Bay, after 168 years lost. Sometimes only a poem will do.
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Be dazzled by this glittering life
Sparkle in the dying light of stars. You too will join them as effervescent dust soon enough.
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web morning
This morning saw a beautiful combination of sunlight hitting wet trees and shrubs that were coated with a patina of frost. A mist curled up from the iced grass toward blue skies. Everywhere there were spider webs, jewelled with beads of water. One long chain formed a barrier across the path – I spotted it at the last moment and ducked underneath. Photographing cobwebs can be tricky, but I managed to snap a few of them. This was one of my favourite shots. Oh! The artless cunning of nature.
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beyond the wall
This is a recent photo during our current sunny, frosty weather. It reminds me how photographs are so much better when you get good light… I’ve our holiday decorations packed away since Monday. I try not to let them linger too much after the festivities are over, but I do miss the blinking lights. They’re cheery during our long nights. Although, I’ve already noticed the extra minutes on our evenings, which is a delightful amuse-bouche of longer days to come. I’ve not made any resolutions for the New Year. In general I’m always working to a plan of improvement both personally and creatively, and I try (I don’t always succeed)…
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Huguenot memories
Yesterday I posted images to my Flickr photo stream of my recent trip in Dublin. All of them were taken with the camera in my mobile phone (a Sony Xperia X10 mini – an Android smartphone). Looking through them I thought about my time living in Dublin, and the photographs I took using my first digital camera. Back then, I was using a Fuji FinePix 2.4 megapixel camera, which I referred to as Pixie. I could take images at several resolutions, but in those days (a mere 9 years ago) if you were posting photos on the web the image quality was not expected to be high, so I often…
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two nobles
There are a lot of Holly trees my local woods. Not that you’d notice during the summer, when the other trees flounce about in their finery. Lately, I’ve noticed Holly’s re-emergence as one of the dominant personalities of the woodlands as we spin further into autumn. The above photograph is of a Holly tree growing under an Oak which I took yesterday. In Irish lore there were four classifications of trees, the highest being Airig Fedo, or Nobles of the Wood. There were seven trees in that caste, including Oak and Holly. As I considered the mythology of trees, as well as this image of the two nobles standing beside…
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sun in the sky you know how I feel
I’ve been getting a constant stream of birthday greetings from people via Facebook and Twitter today, and it’s lovely. Thank you all! People might grumble about social media, but it has its good uses too. I’m just about recovered from my two-week trip with back-to-back convention in the UK. World Horror Convention was probably the highlight because it was a well-run convention, and I met loads of new people at the event since the horror/dark fantasy crowd aren’t well represented at the likes of Eastercon (which focuses more on SF and Fantasy). It’s pretty much confirmed that I’ll have to start attending Fantasy Con in England, and I’ve already joined…
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"walk on air against your better judgement"
Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, author and playwright Seamus Heaney has been awarded the £40,000 David Cohen Prize for Literature. Every two years the David Cohen Prize is bestowed upon a writer, novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist or dramatist in recognition of an entire body of work, written in the English language. Previous winners include Derek Mahon, Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing, and V.S. Naipaul. By strange coincidence I happened to read Heaney’s new poem called “In the Attic” a couple of days ago. It was published in The New Yorker last month. Because Heaney has enjoyed a long and successful career as a poet, and many of us studied him in…
