Annemarie Ní Churreáin
[The Poison Glen] speaks of dislocation and loss, of pain and attachment, in a poetry of furious energy and stunning verse-craft…. this Donegal poet is fully conscious of the redemptive nature of poetry, of the saving power that is such a part of its beauty. It is a stunning, central part of her wonderful art that, after pain, she would have us “make a bowl / spilling yellow corn-light”. What a gift Annemarie Ní Churreáin is to contemporary Irish poetry, what an absolute gift to this nation from Donegal.
— Thomas McCarthy, Dublin Review of Books
Annemarie Ní Churreáin comes from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Bloodroot, published by Doire Press in 2017, was shortlisted for the Shine Strong Award and the Julie Suk Award. She is a recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award and co-recipient of the Markievicz Award. She has received literary fellowships from USA, Germany and Scotland and was Writer-in-Residence at NUI, Maynooth, and Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris.
She was a 2022 Decades of Centenaries Artist in Residence at Donegal County Archives Service. Ní Churreáin is also a librettist and theatre writer. The Poison Glen is her first collection with The Gallery Press.
The Poison Glen
Memory is a cursethat keeps on flowering.— ‘Ghostgirl’
The story of the stolen or missing child sits at the heart of The Poison Glen, alongside a desire to bear witness to family loss and cultures of silence in Ireland. Weaving together landscape, history, and the compelling mythology of a Donegal site known as ‘The Poison Glen’, here are poems of grit and burning, of wildness, grace and magic, of dreaming and compassion. The collection is rooted by ‘The Foundling Crib’, a poem that dwells on a long-gone Foundling Hospital in Dublin, accompanied by poems written as responses to sites of various Irish church- and state-run institutions.
In poems both tender and ferocious the book illuminates questions that run deep in the Irish psyche. Ultimately it asks, How can darkness be overcome by light?
