Keen wit and literary grit infuse the work of two Belfast writers who both show how poetry can transcend the everyday
This is the month to salute two Belfast poets: the first revisits something that has already happened; the second explores, more often, what has not happened in the light of what might. Gail McConnell’s The Sun Is Open is about the murder of her father. She was three when, in 1984, William McConnell was killed by the IRA. She does not remember him or his death – he was checking under the car for explosive devices when he was shot outside the family home in front of his wife and daughter. McConnell’s devastated poetry is a stand-in for memory.
Stephen Sexton, winner of 2019’s Forward prize for best first collection pushes against the limits of possibility in his pioneering second collection, Cheryl’s Destinies. Imagination seems to exist rather as if it were a second language. He is uncommonly fascinated by the thought of other people’s imagining, of imagination as a currency spent elsewhere. In The Chair, he even wonders whose dreams he is having.
Continue reading...