A slim volume from the winner of the 2008 Listowel Writer's Week Poetry Competition
These poems like the pizzicato rain of their title are refreshing, musical and slightly strange. Georgina Eddison is joyfully serious about her themes: family, childhood, work, history, are captured in wonderfully warm, deft, light-filled poems. Her parents' hi...
A slim volume from the winner of the 2008 Listowel Writer's Week Poetry Competition
These poems like the pizzicato rain of their title are refreshing, musical and slightly strange. Georgina Eddison is joyfully serious about her themes: family, childhood, work, history, are captured in wonderfully warm, deft, light-filled poems. Her parents' hilariously sparring marriage, her Aunt May dancing naked in her room at fifty in an English suburb, Mrs Sonnix on her way to the pawnshop - the people never stay still. But this poet is more than a lucky onlooker, and from children in their bedrooms like mermaids 'singing, singing', to Anna Freud, to imagined fish in a surreal ocean, she has an unshakeable grasp of her poetic art which reinvents them all in language and imagery that are deceptively simple, bright and strong.
Eiléan NÃ Chuilleanáin
Georgina Eddison is a
counsellor and psychotherapist. She lives in Kildare, Co. Wicklow. She
has an M.Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin. She was
the winner of the 2008 Listowel Writers' Week Poetry Competition for
the poems in this slim volume. She has also been shortlisted for a
Hennessy Award and was awarded first prize in poetry at the Dunlavin
Arts Festival 2003. Her poems have appeared in, among others, The SHOp, The Sunday Tribune, Cyphers, and Broadsheet. She has also published several short stories and is currently working on a novel.
The Poet's Bed
I will make myself a bed, a four-poster,
The framework composed of the bones
Of dead poets, (e.g. Patrick Kavanagh's rib).
I will dress it with linen, exact as a sonnet,
Each sheet stretched tight as vellum,
Blue lines inked on it, with a nib
Sharp as a tooth. For my head, a pillow,
Maybe organza, embroidered with
A stanza or two: the coverlet
A patchwork of villanelle,
Edged all around with haiku.
I will lie among the metred drapes,
Free my mind from all that's troubling
And spend my nights heroic coupling.
Review: Grace Wells for The Stinging Fly, Winter 2009-2010
In Standing in the Pizzicato Rain, Georgina Eddison picks up where Liam Ryan leaves off with her 'Transplanted Aunties' 'with funny accents,/unpacking suitcases/full of nylon slips,/Avon soaps, roll-ons,/high heels, Mum deodorant,/high lacquer,/Opal fruits and Spangles.//Wanting batch-loaf,/Denny's rashers, Mikado biscuits,/Lyon's tea, red lemonade./Telling us with English voices/'DuÌn an Doras'/to prove they hadn't forgotten.//Never suspecting/that door had/long since closed.' These well-crafted, neat poems won the 2008 Listowel Writers' Week Poetry Competition, and display a latent talent, keen eye and, as EileÌan Ní ChuilleanaÌin says in the blurb, an imagery which is 'deceptively simple, bright and strong.'
