Renowned Dundalk writer Jaki McCarrick publishes her first poetry collection
Now, her arm is almost healed and the collection, published by Dedalus Press is due to hit the shelves of most bookshops and from the publisher's online system.
"Thankfully I had the bulk of the work done when I had that cycling accident,' she says,
Better known for her plays and fiction, Jaki says she has been working on this collection of poems on and off for about twenty years.
'There was no real theme to it but a few years ago I wrote Sweeney as a Girl, which was included in a collection with other local authors.'
"I've always loved the story of Sweeney, the king who goes mad. He has inspired so many other writers including Flann O' Brian and Seamus Heeney,' she explains. 'I thought it would be interesting if I took that story and flipped it so that Sweeney was a female.'
She notes that in the tale Buile Shuibhne, which sees the 11th century Irish king turned into a bird, no one knows the gender of the bird.
Jaki then built her collection around her poem Sweeney as a Girl, setting poems in Oriel and the Mournes which are mentioned in the original story.
"I decided to pin it here, set it here. I remembered how interested I was in Sweeney and would go back to the story and also how it inspired non-direct works like Flann O'Brian's At Swim Two Birds.'
She also learned that Paula Meenan had written a play called Mrs Sweeney in which she had given the king a wife who lived in Dublin.
The result is a set of Sweeney poems which provide a framework for work that explores modern life as well as well the lives of many women from history, more recent and mythical.
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Once she had put the collection together, drawing in old and new poems, she sent the manuscript off and was delighted when Dedalus Press said they'd love to publish it.
Jaki will be reading from the collection at the Cork International Poetry Festival on May 15 and and will also read at the launch of Sweeney as a Girl in the Basement Gallery of An Tain Arts Centre on May 30.
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