Bio

Author of three collections published by Doire Press, 2011, 2013 & 2018, Susan reads a selection from all three books here, at University of Missouri-St.Louis (Feb, 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vno1MG2pSQE&t=13s . Her poems have appeared, among elsewhere, in: The Cafe Review, Oregan, USA - Gather In, in a Special Irish Edition; Bosom Pals,Ed Marie Cadden (Doire Press, 2017) an anthology entirely in aid of Breast Cancer Research in the National UniversityHospital, Galway and When They've Grown Another Me in Poetry Ireland Review, Dec 2018. https://www.poetryireland.ie/publications/poetry-ireland-review/online-archive/view/when-theyve-grow. In January 2018 her poems were Commended in the Gregory O'Donoghue Poetry Competition.

She has been an invited reader of her poems at local readings in Galway, Cork and Dublin and at festivals, including the Belfast Book Festival, Cuirt International Festival of Literature and Clifden Arts Festival and her poems have been read on radio.

Susan completed her degree in social science and qualified as a professional social worker in Trinity College, Dublin 1975. She was a psychotherapist, trainer, facilitator and occasional consultant to organisations for over thirty years until her retirement in 2012. Drawing together her writing with her earlier skills she has written interviews and facilitated conversations mediated by poetry. She has also published creative non-fiction.

Her workshop Having a New Conversation: About Dreaming was listed on the The Cuirt International Festival of Literature Programme (2015) and she facilitates similar workshops on a variety of themes, discussed through the medium of poetry, regularly and occasionally in local community settings.

While a founding editor of Skylight 47 Susan interviewed: then Ireland Professor of Poetry, Harry Clifton; Kay Ryan, the Pullitzer prize-winning poet and former US Poet Laureate, invited to Ireland by Dromineer Literature Festival - and Dani Gill, who talks about curating The Cuirt International Literature Festival.https://skylight47poetry.wordpress.com/previous-issues/. Susan's interview of Maeve O'Sullivan, appeared in The Honest Ulsterman February, 2018.http://humag.co/features/around-the-world-in-poetry-haiku-and-haibun

Wednesday, 19 March 2014

Lichen clusters on bare branches like bog cotton

'Up the airy mountain/Down the rushy glen' I quote childhood lines of memory on the board walk, amidst bare heather branches and lots of wet moss just under the water in this bog-land wilderness over looking Lough Gill. Inisfree is in view. It's the Sligo Way. I'm in my element. Not surprisingly, my companion is looking at me strangely. My grandfather used to recite the poem dangling us on his knee. These words of William Allingham were probably the first poetry I heard, apart from Nursery Rhymes. We've visited Dromahair. I have ancestors here.

There are wisps of cotton like lichen on bare heather. I have to stoop to prove they're not bog cotton. On the way down I spot a cluster of lichen on bare rock, squat to take a  photograph.


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