Paula Cunningham Q&A on her Writing Ritual
Paula Cunningham talks about her writing ritual.
Paula Cunningham
Paula Cunningham
Paula Cunningham was born in Omagh, County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1963. She has lived in Belfast for much of her adult life. She won the Poetry Business competition in 1999, and a poetry chapbook, A Dog Called Chance, was published by Smith/Doorstop that year. Her poems have been widely anthologised. She also writes drama and […]
Mother’s Pride
Handy with a knife, his preferred medium was Mothers Pride plain toast. This is the way the nuns eat – soldiers; this is the Protestant half. Here’s Omagh, Belfast, Enniskillen, Dublin, Donegal with Errigal hastily moulded from Clew Bay, a crumb for an island for every day of the year, and Cork, […]
Gist
In this his apocryphal pre-incarnation I have him in nightgown and cap clutching a candlestick, big Willie Winkie cack-handed with drink, he soft-shoes, manoeuvres himself in behind her, just as the first of his hic- cups erupts, impressing the spoon of himself on her echoing form, more stirred by the whiff of her, dizzy with […]
Geography and Sweetshops
Lisfannon, Buncrana, Bunduff, Mullaghmore, Rossnowlagh. The best places to swim were always over the border. In the car killing time we played I spy with my little eye… and Spot the soldiers, their camouflage too dark for August grass …something beginning with h… The wee white house, windows for eyes one either side […]
Aubade
Bring the muse into the kitchen Walt Whitman A man is squeezing oranges in my kitchen. I am down the corridor in bed and he is squeezing oranges in my kitchen. From where I lie I cannot see the man but I’ve deduced that he is squeezing oranges. There is something […]
Seeing Things
At the Winter Park ski-holiday reunion who swans in only Stevie whose legs don’t take him far – he’d been hammering under another man’s car when another man’s bomb went off. Answer: the skin. It’s Trivia night and we’re in with a chance. All the other tables are offering liver. What is the […]
Paula Cunningham Q&A on Place in Poetry
Paula Cunningham talks about the importance of place in poetry.