Reviews
“Medbh’s language is frequently simple and unadorned; she is a poet who has come through the performance circuit and thus understands the primal power of the beat in poetry. Many poems are heavily cadenced and song-like, for example ‘Big Bong’, where “our knowing is a no to knowing no / division between being and the void” or ‘The River Ward Steals My Eyes’, with its incantatory evocation of the Co Dublin river that “flowed past the castle and the ancient church, / past the rowan tree, past hazel, / past the houses on the crest.”
(Review of When the Air Inhales You, Irish Times, March 2009)
“Medbh avoids sentiment and portentousness. Balancing form and idiom, she uses poetry for what poetry does best – invention, discursiveness, the many voices – while side-stepping cacophony.”
(Review of Tenant, Poetry Ireland Review, Spring 2000)
“Medbh’s magic is to remind us – men and women alike – that life is a performance, and that creatively describing it requires a form of action, linguistic or physical or both.”
(Books Ireland, February 2004)
*Twelve Beds for the Dreamer: new collection forthcoming in October 2010. Read an excerpt from the collection here.
Máighréad Medbh, Poet
Máighréad Medbh was born in Newcastle West, County Limerick, Ireland. Since the publication of her critically-acclaimed first collection, The Making of a Pagan (Blackstaff Press), in 1990, she has become widely known as a poet who applies much creative energy to the performance of her work. She was one of the few poets who popularised performance poetry in Ireland in the 1990s. She has performed, to consistently good reviews, at a large number of venues in Ireland, Great Britain, the United States, mainland Europe and on the broadcast media.
Máighréad’s other full collections are: Tenant (Salmon Publishing, 1999, a new edition expected in 2010); Split (in Divas!, Arlen House, June 2003); and When the Air Inhales You (Arlen House 2008). A CD, Out of My Skin, was produced in 2002, and her work has been included in a wide range of anthologies. Máighréad has written three novels, the first in a four-volume fictional work for teenagers, and is currently working on a non-fiction aphoristic treatment of the subject of solitude. A story for children, set to music, was commissioned and broadcast by Ireland’s Lyric FM radio station in 2007 and 2008. She was awarded an Arts Council Bursary in 2008.
Buy Online
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| When the Air Inhales You |
| Arlen House 2008 |
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| ¡Divas! |
| Arlen House 2003 |
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| Out of My Skin CD |
| Odin Poetries 2003 |
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