Poetry Ireland: Nithy Kasa, Mícheál McCann & Jessica Traynor

How to Make Love to a Colonised Body is the second collection of poetry by Congolese-Irish poet Nithy Kasa. Written during the time of lock-up, followed by subsequent release, the collection addresses matters in our relationships, both personal and political, with a focus on the two nations Nithy calls home. Holding on to the beauty that exists in nature and in life, these poems play with a language that is second-hand to Nithy. All the while she is testing herself and mingling clear-cut contemporary tones with that of the dreamy traditional Irish poetry.  

Mícheál McCann’s debut collection, Devotion, is a stately book — courtly, even.’ So wrote Declan Ryan in The Irish Times. In that rapturously received first book the author applied a modern setting, sensibility and set of references to a classic Irish lament. In Lives of the Saints he builds on biographical details of Christian figures and situates them in contemporary states of experience and emotion. Centrepieces of this eclectic collection are an ode to a recycling centre and ‘The Impossible Request’ in which the poet’s grandmother forgets that he has told her that he is gay (‘I know, pet, I know’) and asks if he has any girlfriends yet. Assured in its risks, vigorous in its enthusiasms, from its first ecstatic injunction Lives of the Saints is a collection to make one think and feel, then think again.

Jessica Traynor’s New Arcana explores grief, bad boyfriends and the power of female friendship through readings of the Tarot and Tim Burton movies. Moving from teenage friendship and destructive relationships towards a tangling with the realities of family life, domesticity and desire, this highly inventive collection builds into a heartbroken letter to a dear friend (personified in the poems as ‘lydia deetz’) who died by suicide. Interwoven with numbered poems from a newly imagined Major Arcana, New Arcana celebrates both the holding on, and the letting go.

This event is presented in association with Poetry Ireland / Éigse Éireann