Blog

Cuisle Young Poet of the Year Competition

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 20:20:48 +0000

Limerick City International have announced details of their Poetry Festival Competition for next Oct.

There are three categories for all you 'Young Poets' out there...

8-12 under 12 on 1st September 2011

12-15 under 15 on 1st September 2011

15-18 under 18 on 1st September 2011

Entries are welcomed in BOTH Irish and English!! You can write about anything, anything that matters to you, things that happen in your life:special occasions or everyday events. you may submit up to three poems...

Entries should be submitted typewritten on A4 pages.

The name and address of the poet must NOT appear on the manuscript :)

The Closing Date is Sept 26th 2011 and entries must be submitted by post to

Cuisle Young Poet of the Year Competition, Arts OPffice, Limerick City Council, City Hall, Limerick.

for more information or entry form contact Arts Service, Limerick City Council 061 407363 or the competition

co-ordinator 085 7593265

Emily Dickinson Leaving Cert Poetry 2011

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 11:30:08 +0000

Born 180 years ago in Amherst, Massachussettes, Emily Dickinson is making a rare appearence these days, on the leaving cert Honours English syllabus for 2011. I'd say therefore, she is well worth taking a look at - Surely one of the most unusual and eccentric poets ever, she passed most of her 55 years of life as a virtual recluse. When she died 1,175 poems were found in her room. Only a handful had been published during her own lifetime.

It is said that Emily increasingly wore white, a dramatic gesture that set off her titian hair and large brown eyes. I wonder when I read her, particularly poems like 'I felt a funeral in my Brain' what happened to her? To cut herself off from the world as she did...There has been much speculation, that she appears to have suffered some traumaic life event seems certain... the nature of that event we are left guessing at...

We do know that in her early twenties Dickinson enjoyed a number of close friendships, the most intense of all being with Susan Gilbert. Dickinson's letters to Susan have an intensity and passion like no other. In one, she invites Susan to 'the church within our hearts, where the bells are always ringing and the preacher whose name is Love - shall intercede there for us!'

However during their early frienship, Susan Gilbert was also being courted with equal intensity by Austin Dickinson, Emily's brother and in 1853 when Emily was 23 Susan and Austin anounced their engagement. This unsuspected alliance proved devastating to the young Emily. 'I do not miss you Susie - of course I do not miss you - I only sit and stare at nothing from my window, and know that all is gone...' The young Emily was heartbroken, her attachment to Susan had been her whole world.

Ted Hughes however writes that 'the central themes of the poems have suggested to many readers that the 'key traumatic event' was a great and final disappointment in her love for some particular man in the early 1860's', ten years later. Three draft letters addressed to one whom she called 'Master' were found among her papers when she died.These are intense and passionate letters, but the identity of the Master has never been known. The secret remains just that. What is significant is that more than one third of her 1,775 poems were written during the three years 1862 - 1864 when Dickinson was in her early 30's.

Although she often visited Austin and Susan and their three children whom she adored, during their early marriage, Dickinson elected a life of increasing solitude. It was amply interrupted though by a number of friendships, by her books and by her writing. She was greatly supported by another female poet Helen Hunt Jackson. Suan Gilbert's marriage to Austin was a deeply unhappy one and he began a longterm affair with Mabel Loomis Todd. In the 1870's when she was in her 40's Emily was courted by an old family friend Judge Otis Lord. It only lasted a short number of years and her life became punctuated by the death's of those she loved including Otis Lord's own.

'The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my heart from one, another has come.' Her father, her mother, Otis Lord, Helen Hunt Jackson.

The two most obvious features of her poetry are her use of the dash and the capital letter. The dash is used by Dickinson in place of the comma and the full stop. It forces us to pause, stop and think. It adds weight and significance to the thoughts expressed. It focusses our attention on certain words and phrases. It very cleverly adds to the rhythm, groups of words are clustered together creating a regulated pace in a carefully crafted deliberate way.

Capable of great exuberance - 'I taste a liquor never brewed' c. 1860,

extraordinary optimism - ''Hope'' is the thing with feathers' c. 1861,

deep personal psychological distress - 'I felt a Funeral in my Brain' c. 1862

Emily Dickinson is the most unmistakably 'original' poet on this years leaving cert syllabus. Her poetry is the most instantly recognisable of all poetry. But more than that, it is those age old themes of love, joy, pain, heartbreak, mental distress and death that allow her to remain as relevant in our lives today as when Dickinson was writing her poems 170 years ago. We feel her joy, we share in her distress. We empathise.

Emily Dickinson fell ill with Bright's disease in November 1885 and died on the 15 May 1886. Susan Gilbert Dickinson wwrote the obituary and arranged the funeral following Dickinson's instructions 'to be carried out the back door, around through the garden, through the opened barn from front to back, and then through the grassy field to the family plot, always in sight of the house...'

Do You Remember the Wallpaper?

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Little did I realise it when we opened our school bookshop in Gort, that soon I would be
wandering down memory lane with many of our customers about schoolbook covering!!!
When we first opened, to be cutting edge, (or so we thought!) we bought a book covering
machine, to cover the schoolbooks for our customers. We charged them 99c per book and
thought we were great.

It was amazing to parents, who’d spent long frustrated hours with rolls of contact or plastic,
watch how this machine worked, welding perfectly formed covers for every size and shape
of a book. It was a creation of genius!

The reminiscing began...God I remember my mother and the brown paper...Brown Paper!
What about the left over wallpaper? I could remember both. Like yesterday! The book was
laid out on the paper, everyone careful to leave a bit extra for the spine. That way the book
cover would open and close without trouble. Cutting the paper carefully, precisely with the
kitchen scissors. The corners folded in and then a finger to hold everything down while the
sellotape was applied. The sellotape only went across the corners of the paper, if you got the
tape onto the book itself the cover might not open easily.

If your books were covered with brown paper there were wonderful creative options... the
fronts of greeting cards that had been saved previously, could be cut out and glued on
to create exotic works of art. Sleighs, snowmen, robins, birthday cards, easter chicks...
What could be applied to the front of the brown paper was endless, fascinating and a
joy to behold; we eyed each other’s efforts up endlessly as the school year rolled by!
Like old friendly ghosts the memories flooded back, across the shop – counter... until
one day, not too far down the line, as a customer and I once again wistfully reminisced, I
remembered there was always the one with the VELVET!

If your books were covered with wallpaper you needed no birthday card cut-outs to identify
your books. You could recognise your own hallway, bedroom, kitchen in an instant.
And so could everyone else! But, if you were posh – oh yes posh, with perhaps a very,
very, ‘good’ sitting room, chances were that you had ‘velvet’ wallpaper on your schoolbooks!

And as for the rest of us, if we were lucky, we could touch !!