RTÉ launches Illuminations

From spring to autumn 2020, we have lived through a different sort of season, halting normality, forcing change, bringing fear and stress. Art helps us to understand our experience so that we can begin to heal, as individuals and as a nation.

Illuminations is an online gallery of 30 works commissioned by RTÉ exploring the shades of lockdown. Launching on Wednesday, 7 October and rolling out from then to early December, it will feature visual art, photography, film, music, poetry, essays and spoken word pieces from a wide range of established and emerging creative talent. The first series of Illuminations works can be viewed here. 

Artists featured on Illuminations include Sara Baume, Jane Clarke, Dermot Bolger, Pat Collins, Isabel Nolan, Enda Walsh, Niamh Campbell, Hazel Coonagh, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Paula Meehan, John Boyne, Leanne McDonagh, Jeanette Lowe, Stephen Heffernan, Natalya O'Flaherty, Daire Patel and Megan K. Fox.

Faber announces new poetry acquisitions for 2021

Faber announces two new urgent and masterly poetry collections for 2021: Living Weapon by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (21 January 2021) and Auguries of a Minor God by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe (1 July 2021).

 Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe’s spellbinding debut poetry collection explores love and the wounds it makes. Its first half is composed of five sections, corresponding to the five arrows of Kama, the Hindu God of Love, Desire and Memory. The second is a long narrative poem, ‘A is for العرب [Arabs]’, which follows a different kind of journey: a family of refugees who have fled to the West from conflict in an unspecified Middle Eastern country. With an extraordinary structure, it is a skilful and intimate account of migration and exile, of home and belonging.

 Editors Matthew Hollis and Lavinia Singer say, ‘It is an honour for Faber to welcome to the list two poets of narrative force and lyrical grace, whose work responds to the political moment while drawing richly upon the heritage of the past. Distinctive in approach and subject, united in their rhythmic and intellectual power, Rowan and Nidhi offer voices for our times and pathways for our future.’

Words Ireland National Mentoring Programme 2020

Dublin City Libraries and Dublin UNESCO City of Literature are delighted to support Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe as she receives one of 23 one-to-one mentoring from professional writer-mentors over the coming year from Words Ireland National Mentoring Programme 2020.

We look forward to working with her over the next year. Congratulations!

Ireland Chair of Poetry Commemorative Anthology

The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust is delighted to announce the publication of a special commemorative anthology featuring original poems, essays and reflections by emerging poets in response to the work of creative mentors. 

Edited by the recipients of the 2019 Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award — Mícheál McCann, Summer Meline, Marcella L.A. Prince, and Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe — with Frank Ormsby as advising editor, the anthology aims to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Prize win, as well as honour the contribution and legacy of the Chairs of Poetry and their peers, among a new generation of poets. Continuing their fine work, as seen in the Poet’s Chair series, UCD Press will publish the anthology in late 2020.

In an effort to celebrate the unique and formative relationships that exist between new writers and their creative mentors, the editors hope for this anthology to spark an intergenerational dialogue by bridging established, well-known names in Irish literature with newfound, diverse voices, and illuminate the literary heritage, traditions, themes and resonances unfolding in contemporary Irish poetry.

A kind of world-building

Hard Border

So much talk of backstops and borders
bad politics heralding a return
to a history no one wants to see
repeated

so they tell us stories
instead: so many urban legends
that are probably untrue

like, have you heard the one about the house
in Pettigo, partitioned through the middle

or the Belfast woman shoving butter down her socks
the brainy British official beckoning her near
for a friendly fireside chat, all that offending
sticky yellow warm pissing past her legs

or the crafty fisherfellow on that disputed estuary
between Donegal and Derry

who painted his vessel two conflicting colours
so he could fish in the liminal lake without a fig for quotas,
buzzing busy as a worker bee between both harbours

or the bold schoolboy on his bicycle
pedaling across each day
customs guards turning his pockets inside out,
their notions upside down,

finding nothing,
until lines were lifted,
checkpoints closed, guns given up,

then they asked him what it was,
the precious cargo he’d been smuggling
all those years

— they thought he’d never come around,
and he said, like any boy that age —
bicycles

because what could we love
any more
than the things which give us wings?


— Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, from Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets

Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2019

The €1,000 prize, which is awarded to a poet who has not yet published a full-length collection, was presented to the winner, Scott McKendry, at the Kavanagh Weekend in Inniskeen, Co Monaghan, on Friday 27 September.

The judge of the award, poet and novelist Brian Lynch, said, “McKendry’s work centres on Hopewell Place, in the Old Lodge district of Belfast known as the Hammer […] What is most remarkable about Scott, however, is his ear for the music of common speech and high poetry. I foresee a great future for him.

The level of this year’s competition was so high that I felt obliged to choose four runners-up, each of whom, plus a number of other ‘highly commended’ entries, would have been a worthy winner.”

The runners-up are Jerm Curtin, Colette Colfer, Victoria Kennefick, and Audrey Molloy. The highly commended poets are Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Emma Must, A.M. Cousins, Angela Finn, Mark Ward, Sean Kelly, Gail McConnell, Emily S. Cooper, Zosia Kuczynska, and Teresa Godfrey.

Chapter & Verse: The Emerging Feminine Voice in Irish Poetry

Sophie Grenham meets poet Jessica Traynor to discuss the emerging feminine voice in Irish poetry

Originally published in The Gloss Magazine — with The Irish Times. September 2019.

New Irish Writing Winning Poem August 2019: Luna

Luna

looks like she is waning:
lowenergylike, she spills
the creamy orb into
the cappuccino but fails to
move it in the way that makes
a heart
out of what we desire.

She says the new ob/gyn she went
to see, he told her that perhaps she
should consider other options
for she might realistically be past
the point where being able to bear
a child
would be a viable thing.

The nozzle is hot, bothered, frothing
at the mouth hissing in a true temper
yet the consummate barista
seems nearly like a natural:
watch her turn to hush and quiet
the milk
swaddling the tiny arm in white.

She says – he was saying it
could be something to do with
my hormones not doing what
they are supposed to and that
they might even be insufficient
my ovaries
I mean – but what does man know?

I tell her, the real reason
is apparent to anyone less man
more woman drawn by the primal
pull of the moon and how she
is gently ever edging away from
our earth
by four centimetres each year.

Some night she’ll long for us no
longer our blood will halt its tidal
surge towards her hunger, see now
sea, waters rising past our hips
snuffing all breath from our lips
so speak
have him know that until then

– girl,
you are celestial, vital, luminous
you can bear
– just about –
any body.

Hungering: A Poetry Jukebox for Dublin’s Docklands

On a sunny day in Dublin’s docklands, the history of the city can seem deeply buried under sharp-cut modern pavements. The sun bounces between tinted skyscraper windows. The Liffey curls past, its currents hidden deep beneath its glassy surface.

But there are shapes among the plane trees on the dockside campshires – slender, elongated shapes, almost as thin as these young trees, dappled in the vivid green leaf-light of early summer. Behind them, a starved dog crouches. These are Rowan Gillespie’s Famine Statues. 

Stand beside them and address your attention to the area again. Look for the organic, the tactile among the bright steel and glass. The evocative line of the CHQ building draws the eye – a warehouse denuded of its forbidding front, its petrified forest of cast iron columns revealed through its floating glass facade. The masts of the Jeanie Johnston cause a tangle in perspective with the Sam Beckett Bridge’s reclining harp. The cobbles beneath your feet raise a metallic jangle from a passing bicycle. …

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Nidhi Zak/ Aria Eipe’s formerly exotic, fruit wryly addresses cultural difference while honouring the taste of home.

Sights and Sounds: Poetry at the UCD Festival

…This year it will be Raining Poetry at the UCD Festival. Raining Poetry is an outdoor art installation at UCD, created by the Irish Poetry Reading Archive in collaboration with three of Ireland’s well-known haiku poets, and student winners of the 2019 UCD haiku competition.

Using stencils and water-resistant spray paint we have created hidden haiku poems that will only become visible on rainy days. The biodegradable paint is designed to fade within six to eight weeks but, until then, anyone walking around the campus might be lucky enough to be surprised by a poem.

We’re delighted to present work by Irish-language writer Gabriel Rosenstock, award-winning poet and children’s author, Amanda Bell, and founder of Haiku Ireland, Maeve O’Sullivan. Poems from the recent UCD Haiku Competition, run by Dr Lucy Collins from the UCD School of English, Drama and Film, will also feature work by joint winners Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe and Liz Houchin.

“These ‘rainworks’ are a great way to bring poetry out of the classroom, the library, and the bookshop, making it accessible and visible to everyone,” says Ursula Byrne, head of development at UCD Library, who is working on this installation. “The idea first came to us from Paula Meehan, when she was Ireland Professor of Poetry. We’re excited that UCD is the first in Ireland to bring ‘Raining Poetry’ to its pavements.” …

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Winners of inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Prize

The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust is delighted to announce the winners of the 2019 Student Prize.

The Trustees initiated the prize this year in line with their focus on encouraging the writing of poetry within the three Universities who support the Trust. The Trustees, together with the current Ireland Professor of Poetry Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin were delighted to see the level of interest in the prize and commended all those working within the relevant schools and departments of the Universities as well as the students themselves for their remarkable work.

Each student was required to submit a sample of their work, which was examined by the assessment panel.

The Trust have decided to award the following students:

Summer Meline (Trinity College)
Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe (University College Dublin)
Marcella Prince (Queen’s University Belfast)
Mícheál McCann (Queen’s University Belfast).

All prize winners have expressed their delight and thanks to the Trust, for the recognition and encouragement that this prize signifies to them.