Kirjahaku

Forest Music is Susan Connolly's second full-length collection. Many poems in the book depict Susan Connolly's personal encounter with her landscape. Living in Drogheda, close to the Boyne Valley, her poems celebrate the famous archaeological monuments of Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange alongside local landmarks: the Maiden Tower, the seawall at Baltray and the discovery in a back garden of a cobbled garden dating from the early nineteenth century. Her recent work is more experimental in form. These poems involve a typography in which the visual pattern corresponds in some way to the sense of the word or phrase represented. Dissatisfied with words always moving from left to right across the page, in these poems words can be vertical instead of horizontal, and move in circles and spirals as the need dictates.

The Sun-Artist is a collection of "pattern poems" by a poet who has been experimenting with visual texts - often with a uniquely Irish "subject matter" - for several years. Her last Shearsman collection, Forest Music, featured a number of such works, but this chapbook is entirely visual.

"This is a love letter to the poet's home territory: the Boyne Valley, its fabled and blooded river, the port of Drogheda and the mouth of the Boyne at Mornington and Baltray. Susan Connolly is a true original and like all true originals is intensely concerned with sources. These poems reach back to Kells, to Durrow, to Lindisfarne, to the holy books of those places, for the ground of their being. On the page, they negotiate visual spaces that can comfortably fit and ritualize the neolithic, contemporary hostage crises, Alexander Calder, the whammy pedal of a guitar. Symmetrical patternings that recall Persian carpets, traditional embroideries, and intricate folk handwork sit beside witty visual and verbal puns that recall '60s and '70s concrete poetry. Not the least of its many charms are the glimpses in this book of a fugitive Irish lyric poet flitting through the pages." -Paula Meehan

Francis Ledwidge was a frequent visitor to the McGoona household at Donaghmore, near Navan, Co. Meath. Matty McGoona, an amateur naturalist and musician, became his close friend. A chance encounter with an elderly man beside the orchard at Donaghmore was the catalyst which led Susan Connolly to explore the life of Francis Ledwidge in greater depth, and to write her sequence of poems, The Orchard Keeper. Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane, Co. Meath, in 1887. He wrote poetry from an early age. He enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in 1914, and survived the battlefields of Gallipoli, Serbia and Arras before being killed on July 31st, 1917, the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres. The six poems gathered under the title Woman in a Black Hat, warmly recall the lives of close friends and family.