DOIRE PRESS will host a reading at The Crane Bar, Sea Road, next Monday June 8, featuring Breda Wall Ryan, John MacKenna and Robyn Rowland, all three of whom have recently had had new collections published by the Indreabhán-based company.
Breda Wall Ryan grew up on a farm in County Waterford and now lives in County Wicklow. Her awarded fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2006-7 and The New Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction. Her poems have also been widely published and she won the 2015 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition. In A Hare’s Eye is her debut collection. In the words of poet Paula Meehan ‘Breda Wall Ryan bears witness to her own vulnerable life, to the lives of others, to the life of the world — and to all that she sees, even in the darkest places, she brings the light of her careful attention.’
By The Light of Four Moons is John McKenna’s 2nd poetry collection. It is a journey through the personal and the universal. Inspired by private and public events and by the landscapes which have always been central to both his prose and poetry, the collection finds MacKenna searching among the interwoven worlds of the emotional, natural, personal and sacred for his inspiration. Written in a language that is accessible and immediate, the poems will resonate with those who read in search of the unexpected in the commonplace.
John MacKenna is the author of seventeen books— novels, short-stories, memoir, biography and poetry. He has also written a number of stage and radio plays and is a frequent contributor to RTE Radio1. He is a winner of the Hennessy New Writing Award, The Irish Times Fiction Award and the Cecil Day Lewis Literary Award.
Robyn Rowland is an Irish-Australian dual-citizen, annually visiting for thirty-three years, now living half-time in Connemara. She has published nine books of poetry and read her work all over the world. The Line of Drift is her first collection with Doire and is a high-water mark in her writing, with language of lush passion and poems alive with vividness and energy. She has also just published the bi-lingual This Intimate War: Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915, which is an English-Turkish edition by 5 Islands Press.
The reading commences at The Crane next Monday June 8 at 6.30 and admission is free. Next week’s Galway Advertiser will feature an interview with Robyn Rowland by Charlie McBride.
