The Poem as Breath and Artefact Susan Connolly and Máighréad Medbh

In both Susan Connolly and Máighréad Medbh’s new collections with Macha Press, the forming of words and names is a living, breathing process. Connolly’s Midwinter explores how names proliferate and change while still representing the same physical things. Medbh’s Dwelling explores how names and words gain and lose meaning, and how they are impacted by history and politics. The event will begin with a presentation of Connolly’s handmade accordion books and a description of the processes by which they are transformed into a book as printed artefact. Medbh’s writing and performance are firmly rooted in sound and rhythm – in the breath. Dwelling is a poetic engagement with historical erasure, literacy and orality, breath and silence. She will read from the book and describe how her process responded to the embodied act of walking, reading and reimagining. The event will conclude with a Q&A.

Susan Connolly was born in Drogheda, Co. Louth where she still lives. She has published three full-length collections of poetry: For the Stranger (Dedalus Press,1993), Forest Music (Shearsman Books, 2009) and Bridge of the Ford (Shearsman Books, 2016). She was awarded the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. In the same year she received a Publications Grant from the Heritage Council of Ireland for A Salmon in the Pool, a literary and place-names map of the river Boyne from source to sea. Her poems have been published in journals and online in Ireland, the UK, Canada and Australia and are included in The Field Day Anthology: vol IV, Voices and Poetry of Ireland and Windharp: Poems of Ireland since 1916. Some of her work has been broadcast on The Poetry Programme on RTE Radio 1. Bridge of the Ford (2016), a collection of visual poetry, is her tribute to Drogheda. Redfoxpress published What Noise on Earth in 2019 and in 2022 her artist’s book Looking Across the River. Her poetry was exhibited at the Museum of Literature Ireland, Dublin in 2024 as part of the exhibition Is this a poem? She was awarded an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2024 to make POEM, a handwritten poetry map of the river Boyne from Newgrange to the sea using texts from writers who in their poetry have celebrated the Boyne. POEM takes the form of a concertina book over 3 metres long. Her books have been displayed and sold at Dublin Art Book Fair and at Drogheda Zine Fair.

Máighréad Medbh is a poet with nine published books and a reputation for compelling performance. Since her debut with Blackstaff Press in 1990, she has performed widely in Ireland, Europe, the UK and US. Her poetic narrative of the Irish famine, Tenant, was initially published online and subsequently as a print book (Salmon, 1999). She works mostly in long-form sequences or conceptual explorations, and her ecological verse novel, Parvit of Agelast (Arlen House, 2016), was shortlisted for the 2017 Pigott Prize. Her four-part lyrical story for children, The Rescue, was first broadcast on Ireland’s Lyric FM in 2007, set to music by Fergal Carroll. Other work includes transversions from Galician and Arabic, collaboration on award-winning art films, poems in several major anthologies and many journals, three online novels, and an essay-blog from 2012 to 2020. Máighréad has an MA in Poetry Studies and a creative-critical PhD in Experimental Literature from Dublin City University.