Messages in a Bottle - UL Creative Writing hold poetry reading for poetry day

Dr. Emily Cullen and Professor Eoin Devereux from UL Creative Writing co-organized a very successful Poetry Reading event to celebrate Poetry Day, Ireland on April 27th. Held in the Bourn Vincent Gallery, a capacity audience were treated to readings by guest poet Anton Floyd, Emily Cullen, Eoin Devereux and Donal Ryan. Students on the MA in Creative Writing Emily Folley, Maxime Heim, Elaine Kiely, Rian Upton Mescal, Anna Ryan Moloney, Jack Reid, Sarah Lou Ryan, Mairin Stronge and Barry Treacy read from their work. “Poetry is often a vital act of compression” said Emily Cullen, the Meskell Poet in Residence. “In keeping with this year’s theme of ‘Message in a Bottle,’ the students on the MA in Creative Writing composed urgent new poems with important messages about our times, which they cast out for Poetry Day,” Cullen said. “A particular focus of our event was the plight of international refugees” said co-organiser, Eoin Devereux “and we are delighted that our guest poet, Anton Floyd, read from his collection, Depositions (Doire Press, 2022), which engages with the international refugee crisis and themes of war and displacement.” Now based in West Cork, Anton Floyd was born in Egypt, a Levantine mix of Irish, Maltese, English and French Lebanese. His first poetry collection, Falling into Place (2018) was published by Revival Press. Floyd edited Remembrance Suite (2018), a chapbook of sonnets by Shirin Sabri and an international anthology of poems, Point by Point (2018). He received the 2019 Literary Prize awarded by the Dazzling Spark Arts Foundation (Scotland). His most recent collection, Depositions was published last year by Doire Press and a new collection, On the Edge of Invisibility is forthcoming. A collection for the UNHCR was made at the end of the reading event.