Search Results for 'Rita Anne Higgins'

When Fred Johnston was appointed as literary officer in the embryonic Galway Arts Centre, he was asked, on his first day, if he had any plans. He told the then director Dick Donoghue of a dream he had ever since reading Daniel Corkery’s book Hidden Ireland in which the author discussed how ‘courts of poetry’ which had been set up after the Flight of the Earls where poets would gather and recite their works. Fred’s idea was to establish such a court that would introduce international, national and local poets to a Galway audience, a sacred place for the celebration of poetry where it might sing again to big audiences. He did not want poetry to constitute a cultural hidden Ireland.

OVER THE last 10 years, women’s poetry in the west of Ireland has re-energised itself. Taking its cue from the pioneering work of Rita Anne Higgins, Mary O’Malley, Eva Bourke, and Anne Kennedy, it seems to have matured on to another level, adding a new dimension, energy, and maturity to the female poetic voice.

LAST YEAR marked the 35th anniversary of the founding of Salmon press, during which its incredible contribution to Galway's cultural life was fully celebrated. Those heady days of the eighties were brought back to mind when Rita Anne Higgins, Mary O’Malley, and Eva Bourke were given a platform to present their challenging poems to a bewildered, if generally receptive, audience.

THERE IS a memory, somewhat hazy, probably romanticised, of the shop door opening one morning in the early eighties, and a young, statuesque, lady sailing in, wearing a flowing colourful cloak, somewhat reminiscent of an Adrienne Monnier or a Sylvia Beach.