| Date | Wednesday October 16th |
| Time | 6pm |
| Admission | Free - Booking Required |
| Venue | Castletymon Library |
Join host Patrick Deeley as he speaks to poets Damien Donnelly, Linda McKenna and Gustav Parker Hibbett about a life in poetry. This will then be followed by the announcement of the winners of the 2024 Red Line Book Festival Poetry Competition.
The 2024 Poetry Competition winners are:
1st Prize Testimony of Soap
by Ger Duffy
(i.m. of the women and children held in Mother & Baby Homes 1923 - 1996)
“And darkness and worms shall be their dwelling place”
(after Ishion Hutchinson)
ashamed soap birth soap blood soap boarded out soap
buried soap cold soap child allowance soap churched soap
confined soap congenital idiot soap decades of the rosary soap
dehydration soap destitute soap discarded baby soap
dysfunction soap fallen women soap Glaxo Smith Klein soap
human remains soap ironing soap illegitimate soap
inferior sub species soap jaundiced soap keep going soap
lack of consent soap laundry soap lice soap locked up soap
marasmus soap mass grave soap mastitis soap naked soap
Order of the Bons Secours soap panic soap penitent soap
pregnant soap premature soap punishment soap
rape soap rat soap remembrance soap scrubbed soap
sexual abuse soap signed away soap silenced soap
stitched soap sewage soap sin soap skeletal soap
slave soap sold soap trafficked soap unmarked grave soap
unmarried soap unpaid soap vanished soap
their nest of bones our terrible treasure
Ger Duffy lives in Co Waterford. Her poems have been published in PN Review (UK), Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, The Bangor Literary Journal, Under the Radar (UK), The Waxed Lemon, The Sailor Review. Her poems have been anthologized by The Women’s Press (UK), Slow Dancer Press (UK), Dedalus Press, The Sidhe Press(Ger), Verve Press (UK), Moonstone Press (US) and # Public Sector Poetry (UK). Her poem was awarded Poem of the Year 2022 by The Milk House. She has received mentorships in Poetry from the Munster Literature Centre and the National Mentoring Board. She was awarded the Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Award in 2024. Her poems have been placed 2nd in the Goldsmiths Poetry Prize, the Fingal Prize and Write by the Sea Poetry Competition. Her pamphlet was Highly Commended at the International Book & Pamphlet Award in 2024. Her poems have been Highly Commended in the Redline Competition 2021 & 2022, the Frances Ledwidge Award 2022 and the Allingham Award 2023.
2nd Prize: Charade
by Aidan Casey
This is not me ... it’s not me at all.
—Mr Golyadkin
The whole fiasco unfolded
slowly, bizarrely,
on a busy street in broad daylight
under the gaze of dozens
of random citizens and the all-enveloping
pell-mell din of a jackhammer
stabbing the pavement
to pieces and pieces of pieces
when a telescopic young lady
stepped like an antelope
round the maze of hazard tape
and looked, quite simply, right past me.
I brushed it off. At my age,
I thought, I am not on her radar.
But under my feet, I could feel
the Copernican grinding of gears.
Behind gritted teeth, I could hear
the meshing of wheels
leveraging ineluctable imponderables,
nudging me, ever so slightly,
catastrophically, off my trajectory,
depedestaled like Pluto, to err
forever in the uncharted hell
of things that are shadows of themselves.
I felt like Mr Golyadkin, I
felt like shouting
Well, Madam! Last I heard of me,
I was right here!
But I blinked, and time lapsed
and the scene, by degrees, contracted
into the focal point of my pupil,
flipped on its axis, pivoted
out of Street View, and retracted
into the lizard eye of a spycam
fixed to a Tesco’s. The razor-edged sargeant
paused at my last known whereabouts.
Is there anything, however immaterial,
a cover left off a wormhole? Anything?
We scrutinized each frozen frame
for a sign, a turning of heads
betraying a path to where
I went moot, erased
from my sum over histories.
There was only the haze
of dust, the girl side-stepping
the work-gang in hi-viz vests
and some crazy old tosser
waving his arms & raving among the apocrypha
3rd Prize: Magic Tricks
by Finola Cahill
I died here, before.
First plasma and platelet disassociated. Sodium
swooned into the spit of rain, chased January
down the drain – wanton. That said, the real primary
indicator had been stasis, the flattening of personal
spaces into metered trajectory from kitchen kettle
to bedside table to phlegmatic mirror to phone’s
peephole. But, given that it was December,
it could not be rightly determined if this was an acute
or chronic symptom. So then, the skin chipped,
in February, lace bits, volant, losing the run of themselves
in the jump-scare of fake Spring’s cold. Consequently,
my stuffing was left out to air, hardened to lumps
and came away like stones from the mountain, like
the beach in Achill I washed, absolute, back out
to sea. In the between I lost voice, hair, peripheral
vision, my taste for tomatoes, the stock pile of lines
I used dating online and muscular conditioning
in my lower back. However, the return was quicker
than expected. Unfortunately, there was no reincarnation,
I am still absolutely a specimen of the human condition,
rounded corners, fresh teeth, fleshy dents and damp
pleats. I do fight to retain memory of my last
death, because the opportunity for renewed fatality
feels livid with potential, I smell it in the trash bags
I take out and the stale opening and closing corridor
doors, the loamy friends who reappeared out of sleeves
and top hats once I’d Eastered myself back to this life. I keep
the receipt for the priest’s time in my wallet and I’m sure
the pals, deserved, though kindly discrete, still carry
souvenirs of my canny trick somewhere on their persons—
feats of endurance, speech, speed and mind reading, it’s too easy
to forget to remember the reeling carnival of losing a season.
Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children’s writer from Loughrea. Keepsake is his eighth collection of poems with Dedalus Press. His previous collections include The End of the World, Groundswell: New and Selected, and The Bones of Creation. His work has featured in many anthologies and literary journals worldwide as well as being translated to French, Spanish, Italian, Ukrainian and other languages. He received the 2019 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for poetry, and his other awards include the Dermot Healy International Poetry Prize, and the Bisto and Eilis Dillon Awards for Children’s Literature. His best-selling, critically acclaimed memoir, The Hurley Maker’s Son, was published by Transworld in 2016.
Damien B. Donnelly is the award-winning author of the poetry pamphlet Eat the Storms, a Stickleback micro-collection & the conversational pamphlet In the Jitterfritz of Neon, co-written by Eilín de Paor, all published by Hedgehog Poetry Press who also published his first full collection Enough! in August 2022. He’s the host & producer of Eat the Storms, the poetry podcast and EIC of The Storms, a printed journal of poetry, prose & visual art. His work appears in various journals, online & in print. His second collection, Back from Away, was published by Turas Press, May 2024.
Linda McKenna is from Kinsealy in North County Dublin but has lived in Downpatrick since 1995. Her debut collection, In the Museum of Misremembered Things, was published by Doire Press in 2020. The title poem won the An Post/Irish Book Awards Poem of the Year in 2020. Her second collection, Four Thousand Keys, has just been published by Doire Press in Autunm of this year (2024).
She won the Seamus Heaney Award for new writing in 2018 and the Red Line Festival in the same year and has had poems shortlisted for other awards.
She has had poems published in, among other publications, Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, The North, The Honest Ulsterman, Crannóg, Acumen, Atrium, One, The Stony Thursday Book, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Abridged, Skylight 47, The High Window, Raceme, The Poetry Bus, The Lonely Crowd, Causeay/Cabhsair, The Waxed Lemon and has undertaken commissions for the Community Arts Partnership’s The Way It Is project and Poetry Jukebox/Quotidian’s Ambiguities and Lexicon curations.
Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout. Originally from New Mexico, they are currently pursuing a PhD at Trinity College Dublin. They are a 2024 Djanikian Scholars Finalist and a 2023 Obsidian Foundation Fellow, and their debut poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story, is published by Banshee Press in 2024. You can also find them on Twitter (@gustav_parker) and Instagram (@gustavparker).
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