Caroline Lynch is the real thing. Hers is a root language that, like the commonplace wife who plays Medea, takes us far beyond the commonplace. Her world is one where chaos muscles its way into the corners of every safe place. It is a dangerous world which she negotiates through myth, through prayer, through literature. Her poetry, a signalled intention to communicate, to penetrate, is, as she has written, a 'skirmish for fr...
Caroline Lynch is the real thing. Hers is a root language that, like the commonplace wife who plays Medea, takes us far beyond the commonplace. Her world is one where chaos muscles its way into the corners of every safe place. It is a dangerous world which she negotiates through myth, through prayer, through literature. Her poetry, a signalled intention to communicate, to penetrate, is, as she has written, a 'skirmish for freedom'. In the end, her hands are free to accept whatever small beauty that falls into them. In welcoming this volume, I congratulate Caroline Lynch on a fine achievement and wish her well in her poetic quest.
Gabriel Fitzmaurice
Caroline Lynch was born in 1976 and grew up in Cork. She studied Law in UCC, taking part in student theatre productions. While in college, she was the inaugural winner of the Sean Dunne poetry competition. On completing her degree she studied acting and worked as a professional actor for a number of years. In 2001 she was short listed for the Seacat/Poetry Ireland award. While living in Dublin she took a creative writing course in the Irish Writers' Centre with Nuala NÃ Dhomhnaill. She was granted an Arts Council Professional Development Award and obtained an MA in Writing from NUI, Galway. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, in an anthology of new writing (The Incredible Hides in Every House) edited by Nuala NÃ Dhomhnaill, and in Writers Seeking Lovers, a collection from the MA in Writing. She won the Listowel Writers' Week poetry collection competition in 2007. She lives in Galway and is working on her first full collection.
Lost in the Gaeltacht
My radio is only picking up
button accordions and banjos.
Even the fields that wore walls like lace cuffs
are gone. I should have checked the map miles back.
Three cars coming at me like a posse
dazzle the road - I brake so close to the
drunk hitching for a lift that I can count
the threads of his quilted shirt, the whorls of
his thumb. I should have known this would happen:
even while RTE One was sinking
beneath the wavebands it was broadcasting
Irish poems and I had rolled down the
window, hoping that the stars' sharp crystal
might transmit a distant understanding.
