In the Poetry Programme on Sunday 11th April, at 7:30 pm on RTÉ Radio 1, a new collection from Doireann Ní Ghríofa and poems inspired by the Irish border by Gerald Dawe, James Conor Patterson and Emily Cooper.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa was born in Galway and has lived in Cork for many years. A bilingual poet and essayist, she is author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. She is also author of the bestseller A Ghost in the Throat (Tramp Press, 2020), which finds the eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill haunting the life of a contemporary young mother, prompting her to turn detective.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa (credit Pat Boran)

She joins Oliva O'Leary to read from a new collection of poetry in English, To Star The Dark, which contains poems that take place in hospitals, cellars, Parisian parks and American laundromats, inside our screens and beyond them.

The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland has often made its way into poetry and, to introduce a discussion of contemporary border writing, we first hear a reading by Gerald Dawe of a poem from the 1970s. Two young poets, James Conor Patterson and Emily Cooper, join Olivia to talk about how growing up close to the border has influenced their work. James is editor of a forthcoming anthology, The New Frontier: Contemporary Writing From and About The Irish Border, due for publication in the autumn of 2021 by New Island Books, and Emily is a contributor.

Gerald Dawe

James Conor Patterson

Emily Cooper