On Wednesday this week we hosted an online launch of the anthology of poems from our recent competitions, with twenty-four of the forty-four contributors reading the poems we and our external judge, Jeremy Loynes, had selected from the entries.
It felt like a huge achievement to have published the book on time. It was thanks to Jeremy, and the kindness and empathy of the contributors and our online supporters, that we managed it despite Dónall’s illness and my consequent distraction.
The launch on Wednesday was a wonderful hour of poetry — the book blossomed into new colours for us, in the voices of the writers of the words on its pages. My own contribution as host was a bit patchy at the beginning — put it down to my being a bit out of practice on Zoom, and losing track of my intro as I let people in from the ‘waiting room’ — but after a while I was enjoying the readings so much that I forgot to be nervous.
The readers were: Maggie Wadey (first prize); Heather Cook (second prize); the poem that won third prize was read by me because Alison Mace could not attend; I also read Ted Gooda's (Highly Commended) poem as she could not attend; Marilyn Daish (Highly Commended): Sarah Macleod (Highly Commended); Claire Lynn; Jenna Plewes; Eve Jackson; Lizzie Ballagher; Siobhan Ward; Jan Westwood; Judith Wozniak; Gillie Robic; Richard Schwarz; Greg Smith; David Punter; Emma Lee; Patricia Leighton; Jamie Hammond; Tim Kiely; Roger Bloor; Angela Brodie; and Mary Anne Woolf.
So I hope you will enjoy this video. The poems in the anthology are necessarily only a small sample of the entries that we were privileged to receive in January and February this year. We had 1700 poems to consider and inevitably many other excellent poems had to be left out.
In the same way, we could afford to publish as winners only two of the pamphlets that were entered in the Brian Dempsey Memorial Competition. We would have loved to publish many of the others. It was a pleasure to include poems in ‘Can Spring be Far Behind?’ extracted from several of the long-listed and short-listed pamphlet entries.
In September we’re planning to launch ‘Behind Prim Suburban Walls’ by Deirdre Milne and ‘A Long Way Down’ by Beth Brooke, the joint winners of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Competition this year, which are already published and on sale from the authors.
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