In The RTÉ Poetry Programme on 1st April, psychiatrist Jim Lucey and poet Jean O’Brien join presenter Olivia O’Leary for a discussion of poetry and mental health, and Rachael Hegarty, winner of the 2018 Shine/Strong poetry award, reads from her collection Flight Paths Over Finglas.
Professor Jim Lucey is Medical Director of St Patrick’s Mental Health Services and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin. He often uses poetry in his work, and believes it has a role to play in dealing with mental health. He includes many poems in his book In My Room (Gill Books) and on the Poetry Programme reads some of his favourites, including Philip Larkin’s The Mower (By permission of Faber & Faber), Emily Dickinson’s Hope is the Thing with Feathers, and Louis MacNeice’s Thalassa (By permission of David Higham Associates), and quotes briefly from Roekthe’s Lost Son.
Here he is reading Emily Dickinson’s Hope is the Thing with Feathers:
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Jean O’Brien’s mother suffered with mental health issues all during Jean’s childhood, killing herself by overdose when Jean was a teenager. Through her poetry, which she only began to write many years later, Jean attempts to come to an understanding of her mother that she could not attempt at the time, and to imagine an alternative relationship between them. She reads her poems My Mother Ate Electricity, The Backward Step and, to end the programme on a positive and life-affirming note, Skinny Dipping. Jean’s work is published by Salmon Poetry.
Here she is reading the opening lines of Skinny Dipping - you can hear the full reading in the programme:
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Also included in the programme is a reading by Rachael Hegarty from her collection Flight Paths Over Finglas (Salmon Poetry), which has won the 2018 Shine/Strong poetry award. Shine is the national organisation dedicated to the rights and needs of those affected by mental ill health, and the award, set up in memory of Rupert and Eithne Strong, is awarded annually for a first collection by an Irish writer.
The Poetry Programme, RTÉ Radio One, Sundays at 7.30pm.
