Patricia Byrne
Patricia Byrne is a Limerick writer and a member of the Killaloe Hedge School Writer Group. She is a graduate of the MA (Writing) programme at NUI Galway. A writer of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, her short fiction is included in the collection Town of Fiction (Atlantis Collective, 2009). Her current non-fiction project, The Friar & the Felon, centres on the 1894 Valley House atrocity in Achill. Her reviews of Irish theatre and literature have appeared in New Hibernia Review (U.S.A.), The Journal (Australia) and Verbal Magazine (Northern Ireland). Her poetry has been widely published in journals and anthologies and she was the winner of the Dromineer Poetry Prize in 2007.
Patricia Byrne's first poetry collection, Unstable Time, was hand bound and printed at the Winepress, Ireland and published in 2009 by Lapwing Publications, Belfast.
Following publication of Unstable Time, Patricia then turned to prose and, in 2012, produced her nonfiction book The Veiled Woman of Achill (Collins Press, 2012). She is currently researching her second prose book.
The Veiled Woman of Achill can be found at:
http://www.collinspress.ie/the-veiled-woman-of-achill.html
See They Said:- (below)
POEM
(1)
RED RAW
The sow paws and kicks dry straw,
snorting hot fumes, heavy hanging
milk-blown udder,
gorged teats.
/... (stanza one of six)
POEM
(2)
HY-BRAZIL
Hy-Brazil is a mythical island supposedly seen
off Achill every seven years and is likely
a folk memory of submergence events
on the island
Slievemore is black save for its tip.
The mountain looks down
on Krinnuck,
on Dugurt,
on me.
/... (Stanza one of four)
POEM
(3)
CROSSING
I read a strange thing today:
that you have one hour
to select one memory
to take with you -
all other memories will cease to exist.
/... (Stanza one of three)
They said:-
(of The Veiled Woman of Achill )
– The Irish Times
Tuesday, October 29, 2013 at 6:14PM