Four Poets: Ruth Carr, Maureen Boyle, Medbh McGuckian & Maria McManus

Join four of Northern Ireland’s leading poets as they read from their latest collections.

Ruth Carr’s Feather and Bone is a personal response to two remarkable women: Mary Ann McCracken and Dorothy Wordsworth.

Maureen Boyle’s The Work of a Winter contains poems written over sixteen years. They are often narrative and many attempt to give voice to women and men whose voices we haven’t been often able to hear reflecting the idea that poetry can give intimate imaginative access to people’s lives.  

Medbh McGuckian’s Love, the Magician, is a collection in which, ‘The human and the animal go hand-in-hand….as do the domestic and the intimate, whilst Maria McManus’ Available Light is a book about birds, but not in the way you might immediately imagine.

About the Poets

Ruth Carr was born in Belfast where she lives and works as a freelance tutor  and editor, concerned with raising the profile of women in literature. In 1985 she edited  The Female Line, the first anthology of women’s writing to come out of Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement, Belfast, relaunched as an ebook with herpress in 2016). She compiled the section on  contemporary women’s fiction in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing IV/V (Cork University Press, 2001), was a co-editor for The Honest Ulsterman poetry magazine for about 14 years and she has an essay on Word of Mouth Women’s   Poetry Collective (of which she was a founding member) in the recently published Female Lines (New Island, 2017). Her poetry has appeared in a wide range of anthologies and journals and she has read to audiences in places including Derry/ Londonderry, Strabane, Armagh,  Dublin, London, Lancaster, Moscow, Oslo and of course, her home city, Belfast. She has published three collections: There is a House and The Airing Cupboard (Summer Palace Press, 1999 & 2008) and most recently, Feather and Bone (Arlen House, December, 2017). "...[Her] poems combine a disciplined craftsman’s feel for imagery and rhythm  with personal qualities that I can only sum up with inadequate clichés like warmth and deeply-felt humanity." Louis Muinzer .
Feather and Bone:  Mary Ann McCracken was born in Belfast in 1770, Dorothy Wordsworth was born in  Cockermouth in 1771. Their paths never crossed yet their lives shared similar preoccupations and activities - reading, letter writing, enthusiasm for the ideas of The  Enlightenment, the education of the poor, the abolition of slavery and lifelong devotion to a more conspicuous brother. In writing about them I have kept to the facts - where there are facts - but I have drawn on my imagination to respond to these two women’s deep and lengthy lives. There are lots of gaps - this is not a biographical history. These poems are essentially a personal response to two remarkable women.  
Maureen Boyle lives in Belfast.  She began writing as a child in Sion Mills, County Tyrone, winning a UNESCO medal for a book of poems in 1979 at eighteen. She studied in Trinity in Dublin and in 2005 was awarded the Master’s in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. She has won various awards including the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize in 2007 and the Strokestown International Poetry Prize in the same year.  In 2013 she won the Fish Short Memoir Prize. In 2017 she received the Ireland Chair of Poetry’s Inaugural Travel Bursary for work on Anne More, the wife of John Donne and she has just received a sixth award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to support the publication of her debut poetry collection, The Work of a Winter and to write for her second collection. She taught Creative Writing with the Open University for ten years and teaches English in St Dominic’s Grammar School in Belfast.  
The Work of a Winter contains poems written over sixteen years.  They range over history, family relations and stories, observations of birds and nature.  They are often narrative and many attempt to give voice to women and men whose voices we haven’t been able to hear whether from poverty or gender or social standing: a grandfather who worked in the Mill in Sion; Micheal O Cleirigh, one of the annalists of the first history of Ireland or a woman who is being forced to give up her child in a home on the Ormeau Road.  It reflects the idea that poetry can give intimate imaginative access to people’s lives.
Medbh McGuckian was born in Belfast in 1950 where she still lives.  She has won the Rooney Prize, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, England’s National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best Poem.  Her first collection was published by Oxford University Press in 1982 and since 1991, The Gallery Press have published fifteen of her books. The Unfixed Horizon, New Selected Poems was published by Wake Forest University Press in 2016 and a new selected poems is underway with The Gallery Press.  She taught Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens and is a member of Aosdána.
Love, the Magician, is a collection in which, ‘The human and the animal go hand-in-hand….as do the domestic and the intimate. We encounter them as unified things; part of a vision of life, the key to which is the passionate vocabulary Medbh Mc Guckian has created in the service of intuitively known worlds…her insights are extultingly strange, but there is a new genius and a new mystique in her mastery of the unsayable. … this extraordinary book grants to Irish literature a sensational poetic harvest.’  Martin Dyar.
Maria McManus was born between the bridges of Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh. A poet and playwright, Maria lives in Belfast. She is the author of Available Light (Arlen House, 2017), We are Bone (2013), The Cello Suites (2009) and Reading the Dog (2006) (Lagan Press).  Her writing for theatre includes work with Kabosh, TinderBox, Red Lead, Replay, Big Telly and Off the Rails, a dance company.  
Her passion is poetry in public space, and she has collaborated extensively with other artists to create Cirque des Oiseaux, DUST, and LabelLit. She has performed in Ireland, USA, the Basque Country, Portugal and Sweden.  She facilitates XBorders for the Irish Writers’ Centre and Under the Skin for the Seamus Heaney Home Place. She has received numerous Arts Council of Northern Ireland awards, including ACES in 2015 and the Artists’ International Award 2016. She is artistic director and curator of Ireland’s only Poetry Jukebox.