May Swim

By turns lyrical and sardonic, this new collection from Katie Donovan is characteristically watery - candid and uncompromising in its refusal to inhabit the safer reaches of the shore. Whether writing about her hybrid car, the death of whales from ingesting plastic waste, abortion now being legal in Ireland, or the increase in demand for sex dolls, Donovan’s idiosyncratic range of tone and subject continues to enthral and engage the reader thirty years after her debut collection, Watermelon Man, arrived with its ’distinguished and open language’ and ’bold statements of identity’ (Eavan Boland).

In this collection themes of loss, widowhood and ageing co-exist with observations of the poet’s wild garden and its inhabitants, including a mangy fox she helps to survive. In some of these new poems the comforting delusion of rescue is highlighted as a flawed but human necessity, as in the case of Ishi, the last of his tribe ’saved to be / a living exhibit in a museum’. Other poems give voice to the remorse that is the haunting of a failed rescue.

In 2017 Katie Donovan was awarded twenty-first O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry ’for the intensity and conviction of her poetry, in recognition of the great range of both her craft and her subject matter, and in appreciation of her dedication to the witness and the vocation of the writer’.

Katie Donovan was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the University of California at Berkeley. She has published five books of poetry, all with Bloodaxe Books: Watermelon Man (1993), Entering the Mare (1997), Day of the Dead (2002), Rootling: New & Selected Poems (2010), and Off Duty (2016), which was shortlisted for the Irish Times-Poetry Now Award. Born in 1962, she spent her childhood on a farm in Co. Wexford before moving to Dún Laoghaire, a suburb of Dublin where she still lives. She has worked as a journalist with The Irish Times, a Creative Writing Teacher at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (in Dún Laoghaire), and currently teaches Creative Writing at NUI Maynooth. Her work has been widely anthologised, most recently in The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry, edited by Peggy O’Brien, and in Bloodaxe’s Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley. She is the author of Irish Women Writers: Marginalised by Whom? (Raven Arts Press, 1988), and has co-edited two anthologies, Dublines (with Brendan Kennelly), published by Bloodaxe Books in 1996, and Ireland’s Women: Writings Past and Present (with A. Norman Jeffares and Brendan Kennelly), published by Kyle Cathie (Britain) and Gill and Macmillan (Ireland) in 1994. In 2017 she was awarded the 21st Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. Her sixth book of poetry from Bloodaxe, May Swim, is forthcoming in 2024.