Mary Shine Thompson – författare

From Irish Hospice Foundation, who so compassionately provide end-of-life and bereavement care, this collection provides the gift of words at a time when words can be hard to find and is designed to speak to the fears and concerns that illness and approaching death awaken.Created in conjunction with Poetry Ireland and including poems from Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly, Emily Dickinson and Paul Durcan, this is a collection of words to comfort in the most troubled times. Whether you or a loved one are facing the end of life, or if you’re grieving the loss of someone close, you will find solace and refuge here.

Skelligs Haul is a generous compilation of Michael Kirby’s prose and poetry, appealing for his simple, elegant style, his knowledge of unique local lore, and his inimitable observations. Kirby, a man who spent nearly every day of his ninety-nine years on the beautiful Iveragh peninsula, apart from a brief period in the United States, knew better than most that survival demanded persistence, passion, civility and good humour. Close to the World Heritage site of Skellig Michael, he eked out a living fishing and farming with intimate knowledge of every inch of sea and soil. This volume, updated and revised, is organised thematically, demonstrates Kirby’s great gift of expressing the artist’s fresh, passionate insight in elegant, plain language and with the dispassionate slant of a scientist. His knowledge of local birds and fish was as encyclopaedic and forensic as his grasp of place names. Referred to as ‘one of the last authentic expressions of the Gaelic tradition, artlessly fusing the worlds of flesh and spirit’, he was a mystic who found his God, his solace and serenity in every living thing in Iveragh. This book includes some dual texts of poems from Irish to English and vice versa by Kirby, showing that his inward eye led to verse in both the romantic vein and the fine tradition