Crowds were backed up to the door to listen to the poetry showcased by Macha Press poets Eilish Martin, Sam Furlong, Alanna Offield, and Zara Meadows at Charlie Byrne's Bookshop last week.
The first session had two writers: Eilish Martin reading from her third collection titled ! All'arme / ? And what... if not, and Sam Furlong taking poems from Crowd Work, to be released next month.
At the podium and surrounded by books, both writers were at ease with the audience and delivered their works with emotion and charisma. Martin drew on her time spent in Mayo with her husband. It gave the audience an idea of who she is, and her 'head-to-tail' book gave an insight into her interest in the architecture of letters.
Sam Furlong began by drawing awareness to Palestine with a discussion on the ethics and responsibilities of observation. Reading from the forthcoming book, Furlong dived into issues of body, pain, masochism, meat and ethics. Interspersed with humorous anecdotes about being a bad vegetarian, Furlong brought the audience on a whistle-stop tour of themes central to Crowd Work.
Alanna Offield’s debut They Wish They Had What We Had, Kid challenges what people think about New Mexico, and Offield’s brash and swaggering delivery made the audience sit up and listen. Before moving to her newer, unpublished work, she read three poems from her debut, Red Lobster, Spine, and Hands.
Red Lobster and Spine encompass the culture of New Mexico. They also touch on the experience of growing-up outside of the Western World in the 200o's, but wanting to partake in it all the same. The poem Hands was a dedication to her dad, from whom she inherited her New Mexican Chicana heritage.
Zara Meadows’ debut pamphlet, The End of Art, discovers new ways of writing about old places, people and scenes in Ulster, particularly a childhood in West Belfast. Their poems covered the complications of growing-up in an historic place with baggage, but also about a fictional werewolf painting, Connswater Shopping Centre in Belfast, an ice hockey accident, and the image of language in a brawl.
Highlighting the main descriptions of the poems oversimplifies Meadow’s writing, and their skill with language and poetry is admirable.
Walking past Charlie Byrne's without popping in misses the charm of a Galway bookshop, but during the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, those walkers missed a whole lot more.
