The Salmon Poetry Podcast

Episode 22

Orla Martin-Somewhat Vortex

Somewhat Vortex, the debut poetry collection by Orla Martin, is a response to the ebb and flow of life. Landmarked by loss, by love, by hope, the work is underscored by a warm and witty thread. A singular and somewhat staccato style brings into focus a unique take on the banal, the absurd and occasionally a robin. Angled over life, the poet seeks to understand and connect the zig zag of people, the jagged and plume with lambent portraits of family, epilogues to love and a view from the poetry spectrum. Some poems are the flotsam and jetsam of error, others are rare bright star bursts of content. There is a guest appearance by Wilson, the emotional support blackbird. There are Tuesday clothes. There could have been many more references to Radiohead. There are poems that may create something beautiful, perhaps.

There is something wonderfully theatrical about Orla Martin’s debut collection Somewhat Vortex, with many of its poems begging for a mike and a captive audience. But like all theatre, behind the drama, the irony, the self-deprecating wit lies the quiet pain and hard-earned joy of what it means to be human. Remember, not too much of yourself, it scares them
off – the poem’s narrator reminds herself, but these poems insist on having their say, unexpectedly revealing through playful and clever use of language, the darkness as well as the light – leave me untamed, uneven, odd, hopping for my life down the street. Short and sweet, with a satisfying sting in its tail, Somewhat Vortex will have you standing in your seat, shouting ‘More!’
-Anne Tannam

Episode 21

Celeste Augé: I Imagine Myself

I Imagine Myself is for anyone who has ever imagined they were someone (or something) else. A powerful collection that asserts the freedom to have a visible midlife as a woman, to have difficulties in a relationship and work through them, and to weather the storms of ageing. In ambitious and dynamic poems, I Imagine Myself gives voice to the experience of trying to discover a new self, tracing an arc through illness, middle age, connections to other people and the natural world.

Celeste Augé is the author of The Essential Guide to Flight (Salmon Poetry, 2009) and the collection of short stories Fireproof and Other Stories (Doire Press, 2012). Celeste has a Masters degree in writing from NUI Galway. Her poetry has been short-listed for a Hennessy Award, and she received a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland to write Skip Diving. In 2011, she won the Cúirt New Writing Prize for fiction. She lives in Connemara, in the West of Ireland, with her husband and son. 

Episode 20

Emer Fallon Thin Lines

What lies in those in-between spaces between ocean and land, earth and air? And what happens when we cross a line and enter that suspended space?

The poems in this collection explore the places we encounter between sanity and madness, sickness and health, the past and the present, and life and death, travelling from a Wicklow childhood to life in the West Kerry gaeltacht, and examining the many crossing points encountered along the way. 

Thin Lines is Emer Fallon’s first collection.

Episode 19

Eamonn Wall : My Aunts at Twilight Poker

The rich narrative poems in My Aunts at Twilight Poker provide nuanced and many-sided explorations of Irish and Diasporic life— with particular focus on Eamonn Wall’s hometown of Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, and on St. Louis, Missouri, where he had lived for the past two decades—as both have unfolded through the past century.

Eamonn Wall is a native of Co. Wexford who has lived in the USA since 1982. In addition to his six volumes of poetry published by Salmon, Eamonn Wall has written two prose books: Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions (2011) and From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish (2000). He lives in Missouri where he is employed by the University of Missouri-St. Louis as a professor of International Studies and English. Eamonn Wall serves on the board of Irish American Writers and Artists Inc., an organization founded to foster and promote the work of Irish American writers and artists. He is also a founder of Scallta Media—an initiative to promote the work of up-and-coming Co. Wexford creative artists.

Episode 18

Edward O’Dwyer: Exquisite Prisons

“Edward O'Dwyer's poems in Exquisite Prisons pack the quotidian with a creeping terror; motorists nervously migrate to investigate the car stalled at the lights, a father is filmed throwing his child higher and higher, a husband wonders if his wife also fantasises about killing him. These poems are savagely ironic, authoritative and delivered in an unsettling coaxing voice that occupies that same dazzling imaginative territory as Shirley Jackson in The Lottery.” Eleanor Hooker

Edward O'Dwyer is a secondary school teacher, poet and fiction writer from Limerick, Ireland. He has published three collections of poetry with Salmon, most recently Exquisite Prisons which appeared in 2022. It followed The Rain on Cruise’s Street (2014), which was Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes, and Bad News, Good News, Bad News (2017), which contains the poem, ‘The Whole History of Dancing’, winner of the Best Original Poem award from Eigse Michael Hartnett Festival 2018. He has represented Ireland at Poesiefestival, Berlin, for their European ‘renshi’ project. He took part in Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series, and has been shortlisted for a Hennessy Award for Emerging Poetry. His first short story collection, Cheat Sheets, was published by Truth Serum Press in 2018 and features on The Lonely Crowd journal’s ‘Best Books of 2018’ list. His poems and stories have been published in journals and anthologies around the world, both digitally and in print. He is the current Poet Laureate of Adare, Limerick, named by Poetry Ireland as part of their Poetry Town initiative.

Episode 17

Cahal Dallat: Beautiful Lofty Things

Neither object lessons nor exhibits in an esoteric cabinet of curiosities, Cahal Dallat’s poems, in Beautiful Lofty Things, spring from quotidian items and artefacts that connect poet and reader with an eclectic mix of people and places, from present-day Rajasthan, Slovakia, Kansas City and North Carolina via London, Montmartre and Morocco, to growing up in the Antrim Glens, and back through the unlikeliest of family heirlooms to Belfast and Ballycastle in the twentieth century's first half.

Each inanimate object, its image facing the associated poem, animates the poet’s world of ideas and invention, thought and art, rumination and reflection, his quest for meaning in past and present, his exploration of events and individuals that shaped a personal identity.

Canal Dallat is a poet, musician and critic. He was born in Ballycastle, Co. Antrim and now lives in London.  He has contributed to BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review; winner of the 2017 Keats-Shelley Prize; founder/organiser of WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project; 2019 joint Writer-in-Residence (with Anne-Marie Fyfe), Lenoir-Rhyne University, Hickory NC; 2018 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellow, University of Texas, Austin TX; 2017 Charles Causley Centenary Writer-in-Residence, Launceston, Cornwall. Previous poetry collections include The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff).

Episode 16

Paul Perry: Jamais Vu

“Jamais Vu is a hall of mirrors. In these marvellous and haunted new poems Perry observes a life that may be his or may be ours. Nothing and everything matters. Yet all is exactly as it should be, glimpsed and unanswerable. A startling, disorentating, and tender book of poems.”

Annemarie Ní Churreáin

PAUL PERRY is the author of five full length collections of poetry including Gunpowder Valentine: New and Selected Poems, and two pamphlets of poetry from above /ground press The Ghosts of Barnacullia, and Blindsight. A recipient of the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship, he is also a novelist. He directs the Creative Writing Programme at University College Dublin.

Episode 15

John Griffin, Erosions

Erosions is John A. Griffin’s first full-length book of poems. Written shortly after he emigrated to the United States, the poems comprise a kind of Bildungsroman exploring themes of boyhood innocence, fantasy, landscapes, nature, death, loss, absence, exile, and a coming into one’s powers as one seeks to apprehend the changes wrought by time, epiphany, and departure. Absence, lines, natural forces, spirituality, and extinction are all leitmotifs in the book, as these combine to displace a burgeoning identity rather than overtly defining one.

John A. Griffin was born and raised in Tipperary, Ireland, and emigrated to the USA in his early twenties, where he read for his BA, MFA, MA, and PhD, specializing in German Idealist Philosophy as it laid the groundwork for British Romantic Aesthetics, especially the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose proposed though unwritten Opus Maximum was the subject of his dissertation. He has published poems & essays in literary journals, and two chapbooks, After Love and Absences - A Sequence. He recently emigrated again, and is now living and working in Saudi Arabia, where he is the Academic Director in a private, international school. Erosions is his first book.

Episode 14

Susan Rich Gallery of Postcards and Maps

"The new and selected poems of Gallery of Postcards and Maps introduce themselves with a warmth that deepens into wisdom. Susan Rich finds music in everything inside and outside her windows: Leonora Carrington, Vegetarian Vampires, lovers and ex-lovers, Lorca and Courbet. These terrific poems are full of compassion, lyricism and attention. The selected reflects an ever-present restlessness of spirit, flesh, and intellect." - Terrance Hayes

Episode 13

Elvis Alves Blackfish

Rachel Coventry is a Galway-based poet and theorist. Her first collection Afternoon Drinking in the Jolly Butchers was published in 2018 by Salmon Poetry. Her poems have been published in many journals including The Rialto, The North, Stand, The Moth, The SHop, Poetry Ireland Review, and Abridged. She holds a doctorate in philosophy from The University of Galway. Bloomsbury will publish her monograph Heidegger and Poetry in the Digital Age: New Aesthetics and Technologies in 2023. Her second collection, The Detachable Heart, was published by Salmon in October 2022. 

Episode 12

Rachel Coventry The Detachable Heart

Rachel Coventry is a Galway-based poet and theorist. Her first collection Afternoon Drinking in the Jolly Butchers was published in 2018 by Salmon Poetry. Her poems have been published in many journals including The Rialto, The North, Stand, The Moth, The SHop, Poetry Ireland Review, and Abridged. She holds a doctorate in philosophy from The University of Galway. Bloomsbury will publish her monograph Heidegger and Poetry in the Digital Age: New Aesthetics and Technologies in 2023. Her second collection, The Detachable Heart, was published by Salmon in October 2022. 

Episode 11

Mary Dorcey Life Holds Its Breath

Mary Dorcey reads from her most recent Salmon Poetry collection Life Holds Its Breath.

Mary Dorcey is a critically acclaimed Irish poet, short story writer and novelist. She was awarded The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1990 for her short story collection, A Noise from the Woodshed. She is the author of the bestselling novel A Biography of Desire and is an elected member of the Irish Academy of Arts and Letters, Aosdána. Life Holds Its Breath is her tenth book.

One of her major themes is the love between mother and daughter and the life-long, shape-shifting journey she records between these two has produced some of her most loved poetry.

The first Irish woman in history to advocate in speech and writing for LGBT rights, she was a founding member of 'Irish Women United', 'The Sexual Liberation Movement' and 'Women for Radical Change.' Her subject matter has been recognized for its radicalism and her style for its elegance and sensuality.

Episode 10

Pete Mullineaux We Are the Walrus

Pete Mullineaux’s fifth collection is chock full of ‘strange but true’ surprises: from Plato to pangolins, Microsoft Windows to walruses, foxes to fireworks – offering a serious but at the same time playful exploration of Nature alongside human nature, with a particular focus on ecological concerns and our planet’s vulnerability.

“Reading Pete Mullineaux’s new collection, you want to sing along, lift your banner, shake your fist – dance. More Basho than Beckett – his poetry ranges somewhere between the Green Man and the curious child. A compassionate heart beats in every line.''- Tony Curtis

Episode 9

Fiona Bolger Love in the Original Language

Crossing borders of meaning, territory and flesh itself, Fióna Bolger’s new poems explore the limits and possibilities of language. Survival can depend on nuance, insider slang, an accurate translation, or knowing when to stay silent. Fired by a passion for justice and her awareness of how rarely justice is served, Bolger gives voice to the migrant and the exile, who retain their dignity and the markers of their culture.

Fióna Bolger lives with her tall daughter and short dog in Dublin. She has never left Chennai. She is a creative facilitator interested in collaborations and mentoring new voices. She works with Outlandish Theatre Platform and ReWrite. More about her on www.fionabolgerpoetry.com.  Love in the Original Language is her first collection with Salmon.

Episode 8

Louise C. Callaghan - Moonlight: A Full Moon

Louise C. Callaghan was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1948. She is the author of The Puzzle-Heart (1999); Remember the Birds (2005); In the Ninth House (2011) and Dreampaths of a Runaway in 2017. She is editor of an anthology of poetry called Forgotten Light: Memory Poems (A&A Farmar, 2003). Her poems have been published in journals throughout Ireland and the UK and are included in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature, Volumes IV & V, Voices and Poetry of Ireland. (Cork University Press) and Windharp: Poems of Ireland since 1916 (Penguin Books, 2016).  Her work is recorded in the Irish Poetry Reading Archive, UCD. Her play, Find the Lady, which is based on the life of Kate O'Brien, was commissioned by the Abbey Theatre Company (1993). She has taught creative writing in Ireland and the US. and has an M.Litt in poetry from St Andrews, Scotland (2007). Moonlight: A Full Moon is her fifth collection of poems with Salmon Poetry.

Episode 7

Kevin Higgins - Ecstatic

Kevin Higgins is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway. He has published five previous full collections of poems: The Boy With No Face (2005), Time Gentlemen, Please (2008), Frightening New Furniture (2010), The Ghost In The Lobby (2014), & Sex and Death at Merlin Park Hospital (2019). His poems also feature in Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010) and in The Hundred Years’ War: modern war poems (Ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe May 2014). Kevin was satirist-in-residence with the alternative literature website The Bogman’s Cannon 2015-16. 2016 – The Selected Satires of Kevin Higgins was published by NuaScéalta in 2016. "The Minister For Poetry Has Decreed" was published by Culture Matters (UK) also in 2016. Song of Songs 2:0 – New & Selected Poems was published by Salmon in Spring 2017. Ecstatic is his most recent poetry collection. 

Episode 6

Frank Golden - If You Tolerate This

Frank Golden lives in the Oughtmama Valley in the Burren, County Clare, Ireland. If You Tolerate This is his fourth collection with Salmon Poetry.

www.frankgolden7.com

Episode 5

Jean O’Brien - Stars Burn Regardless

Jean O’Brien was born and lives in Dublin. She has five previous collection: The Shadow Keeper (1997), Dangerous Dresses (2005), Lovely Legs (2009) and Merman (2012) and her New & Selected Fish on a Bicycle (2016 & 2018). She has won awards such as The Arvon International and the Fish International and been placed in many others including The Forward Prize (Single Poem). She was Writer in Residence for County Laois and was awarded a Patrick & Catherine Kavanagh Fellowship. In 2021, she was Poet in Residence at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. She teaches creative writing/poetry in venues such as the Irish Writers’ Centre, and for County Councils, schools and prisons, she also tutors at postgraduate level. She holds an M. Phil in creative writing/poetry from Trinity College, Dublin. Her work is regularly broadcast and published in anthologies, reviews and online. www.jeanobrienpoet.ie 

Episode 4

Sheila Black - Radium Dream

Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone, Love/Iraq, Wen Kroy, winner of the Orphic Prize in Poetry, and Iron, Ardent. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently, All the Sleep in the World (Alabrava Press, 2021).  Poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Blackbird, The Birmingham Review and The New York Times. She is a co-editor of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011), named a Notable Book for Adults for 2012 by the American Library Association. She received a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, for which she was selected by Philip Levine. She is a co-founder of Zoeglossia, a non-profit to build community for poets with disabilities. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Radium Dream was published by Salmon Poetry in March 2022. 

Episode 3

Raine Geoghegan - The Talking Stick: O Pookering Kosh

Raine Geoghegan, is of mixed heritage, English, Romany, Welsh and Irish. She is a performance poet, prose writer, playwright, voice over artist and performance skills coach. Prior to writing she was a professional actor, dancer and theatre practitioner. She trained in dance, theatre and drama therapy. She founded Earthworks, a Women’s Theatre Collective in 1993. Illness and disability brought her to writing. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize; Forward Prize and Best of the Net, she won the Moon Prize for Writing in a Woman’s Voice and her poem “The Birth of Rage”. Her three pamphlets, Apple Water: Povel Panni, they lit fires: lenti hatch o yog and The Stone Sleep are published with Hedgehog Poetry Press. Apple Water: Povel Panni was chosen as a Poetry Book Society 2019 Selected Pamphlet. In 2024, Raine will edit an anthology of Romany women writers and artists, to be published by Salmon Poetry. 

Episode 2

Sue Hubbard - Swimming to Albania

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist, broadcaster and art critic. Twice winner of the London Writers Competition and winner of third prize in the National Poetry Competition, her publications include Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station and The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), The Idea of Islands: a collaboration with the artist Donald Teskey (Occasional Press, Ireland). Twenty of her poems appeared in Oxford Poets 2000: an Anthology (Carcanet) and, as the Poetry Society’s only Public Art Poet, she was responsible for London’s largest public art poem, Eurydice, at Waterloo. Her poems have been read on Poetry Please, The Verb and Front Row and appeared in The Irish Times, The Observer and numerous magazines and anthologies and have been recorded for the Poetry Archive. Swimming to Albania is her fourth collection.

Episode 1

Todd Hearon - Crows in Eden

Todd Hearon is the author of two collections of poems—Strange Land (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010) and No Other Gods (Salmon Poetry, 2015). His poems, essays and plays have appeared widely in the United States and abroad. He is the recipient of a PEN/New England “Discovery” Award, the Friends of Literature Prize (Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation), the Rumi Prize in Poetry (Arts & Letters), and the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize (Sarah Lawrence College). He served as the Dartmouth College Poet-in-Residence at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, and was a Dobie Paisano Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin. Born in Texas and raised in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, he lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, and teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy.