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Best of Irish Poetry 2010
Editor: Matthew Sweeney

Songs of Earth and Light
Barbara Korun poems translated by Theo Dorgan

Done Dating DJs
by Jennifer Minniti-Shippey
Winner, 2008 Fool for Poetry Competition

Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Edited and translated by Aidan Hayes

Munster Literature Centre

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PAT BORAN

Pat Boran was born in Portlaoise, Ireland in 1963 and currently lives in Dublin. Since receiving the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry in 1989, he has published four collections of poetry as well as New and Selected Poems (2005/2007). In addition to poetry he has published short stories for adults, Strange Bedfellows (1991) and a short fiction title for children including All the Way from China (1999), which was a finalist for the Bisto Book of the Year Award. He has also produced a number of non-fiction works including the popular writers' handbook The Portable Creative Writing Workshop (1999/2005) and A Short History of Dublin (2000). A former editor of Poetry Ireland Review, he has been presenter of The Poetry Programme on RTÉ Radio 1. He is editor of Wingspan: A Dedalus Sampler (2006) and Flowing, Still: Irish Poets on Irish Poetry (Dedalus 2009). In 2007 he was elected to membership of Aosdána and in 2008 received the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award in the US.

Faith

Pushed out of the boat, my father
like so many of his siblings learned to swim
out of necessity. He'd seen, no doubt,
a sack of cats go down into the same

Dinin River, and might have dreamed
the blackness at the other end of that string
of beads, those seeds of air that rose
to bloom and blossom on the water's skin.

And perhaps it helped. More likely though
fear moved faster through his veins
than any conscious memory, and he was
kicking water, grasping, gulping air

before he even knew he'd been pushed in,
his father extending from that small craft
an arm or splintered oar with which
to fish him out, still gasping, into an ark.

©2009 Pat Boran

Author Links

Pat Boran home page

Video of Boran reading 'Tent'

Boran at Dedalus Press

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