Family Furnishings: An Epiphany in the Company of Alice Munro

This essay came second in the Thresholds International Short Fiction Feature Writing Competition in March 2016. It describes my change of heart regarding Munro’s writings after reading her splendiferous short story ‘Family Furnishings’! *** I’ve undergone a startling and epiphanic sea-change after many years reading Alice Munro’s short stories. At times, I have struggled with what […]

A response from Ronan Sheehan to Siobhan Campbell’s review of Mary O’Donnell’s “Those April Fevers”.

Siobhan Campbell’s Cyphers published review of Mary O’Donnell’s “Those April Fevers” Arc Publications 2015 was by any standards a model of the reviewer’s art. The themes of the book are identified. The various forms of verse used throughout the collection are explained. The poet’s voice is, as it were, announced. The writing is judged very carefully […]

Recuperation and my right foot

Your eyes drift to the window outside, the birch trees have dropped dark nets on the day that tangle of branches fishes my mood increasing the sense that each day is a long night and you’re anybody’s propped doll there for the taking now snow falls in thick plops hungrily absorbed by the wet earth […]

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Moulding the Bread I have bought the bread. It is rich with arcane languages, I recognise them, a fermented mound of verbs and nouns. I take the quickened bread and hold it with closed eyes in my double bed while you are absent. I place it in a long plait just where you lie, where […]

Two Poems

The men I once knew The men I once knew offered gifts, like male penguins offering stones to a female in the competition for courtship. One offered a bag of lemons, bright and shiny, still warm from the Mediterranean garden where he plucked them. Another took me on a boat. It had no […]

Disappearances.

Who dug the graves, and what do they know? I often think about the men who dug the graves of the Disappeared. Who were they and what do they remember? Chances are, according to Seamus Ruddy’s sister Anne Morgan when she once spoke about it on television, they were probably the youngest in the units […]

Calm, objective space . . . but are we our geography? Questions from critic Sarah Hopkins on my new book of poems.

Stride Magazine is an online mag. Here’s another response to “Those April Fevers”. I was happy with the cool tone of the critique. The writer herself is objective and non-agenda-ed in my view, a valuable quality which writers appreciate. From Sarah Hopkins’ review in Stride Magazine (UK): “[Mary] O’Donnells sixth poetry collection shows her experience […]

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