Athlone poet receives Agility Award

Athlone poet Jackie Gorman has received an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland.

The project associated with this award is called 'A Call to Keening' and is focused on developing a poetic response to biodiversity loss. The work will be strongly linked to the Irish tradition of keening, the vocal lamentation for what is lost.

“I am honoured to receive an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland and I look forward to developing this work over the coming year. I have a strong interest in biodiversity and ecology and the Irish language, from which the tradition of keening originates. Keening in the past followed a number of structures and observed the use of common motifs and I will be researching ways to include this in my work," Jackie Gorman commented.

"These traditions from the past and from the Irish language have much to say to us today in Ireland. Biodiversity loss in Ireland impacts us all and I want to find a way to share this through poetry. We are losing so much, how animals mourn their dead, how mitochondrial DNA travels through time and how birds follow the magnetism of the earth.”

Jackie Gorman is a native of Coosan who now lives on the west side of Athlone. Her debut collection 'The Wounded Stork' was published in 2019 by The Onslaught Press, UK. She has published widely in a range of journals and has received awards for her work including the Single Poem Award in 2017 from Listowel Writers’ Week.

Research notes for her most recent work 'Inland Notes' have been archived with the Irish Poetry Reading Archive at University College Dublin. Dr Mary Shine Thompson of Dublin City University has described her work as having “a diction that is uncluttered, economical, understated and intense...For her, poetry is life and death”.