The Orchard Keeper - Connolly, Susan

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Résumé :
Susan Connolly lives in Drogheda, Co. Louth. She has published three full-length collections of poetry. Her collection of visual poetry, Bridge of the Ford, was published by Shearsman Books in 2016. She was awarded the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. Her other lifelong interest has been music and she plays and teaches the concert flute....

Biographie:
Susan Connolly was born in Drogheda, Co. Louth, Ireland, in 1956. She studied Music and Italian at University College, Dublin. Her first full-length collection For the Stranger was published by the Dedalus Press in 1993. Other short collections include her sequence Boann in 'How High the Moon' (1991), 'Race to the Sea' (1999) and 'Winterlight' (2002). Collaborations with artist and photographer Anne-Marie Moroney include 'Race to the Sea', 'Ogham: Ancestors Remembered in Stone' (2000) and 'Winterlight'. With Anne-Marie Moroney she co-authored 'Stone and Tree Sheltering Water' (1998), an exploration of sacred and secular wells in Co. Louth. The publication of this book was sponsored by the Heritage Council of Ireland.Susan Connolly was awarded the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. In the same year she received a Publications Grant from the Heritage Council of Ireland for 'A Salmon in the Pool', a literary and place-names map of the river Boyne from source to sea. She has received bursaries from the Heinrich B?ll Foundation and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annamakerrig.The poet Eil?an N? Chuillean?in has written: Connolly in her work explores the significance of place through layers of time, resonating with history, folklore and archaeology.Several of her poems have been set to music by the composer Michael Holohan and have been performed in Ireland and abroad. A 40-minute programme about her poetry 'Touched by Winterlight' was broadcast on ABC National Radio (Australia) in 2005.

Sommaire:
Francis Ledwidge was a frequent visitor to the McGoona household at Donaghmore, near Navan, Co. Meath. Matty McGoona, an amateur naturalist and musician, became his close friend. A chance encounter with an elderly man beside the orchard at Donaghmore was the catalyst which led Susan Connolly to explore the life of Francis Ledwidge in greater depth, and to write her sequence of poems, The Orchard Keeper. Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane, Co. Meath, in 1887. He wrote poetry from an early age. He enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in 1914, and survived the battlefields of Gallipoli, Serbia and Arras before being killed on July 31st, 1917, the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres. The six poems gathered under the title Woman in a Black Hat, warmly recall the lives of close friends and family....