Poetry at Bray Arts.
Anne Fitzgerald is well known to Bray Arts, not only has she regaled us before with her poetry but she has manned the doorway upstairs at the Martello too, keeping Bray Arts safe from gatecrashers and other freeloaders. All, of course, with her inimitable charm, a gift she brings to delivering her poetry.
The voice is mellow and warm, the verse beguiling. Narratives are spun on a web of folk memory and personal odyssey. Her latest collection is entitled Beyond the Sea, hinting at her most constant theme, the lures and opportunities of the ocean as highway, conveying emmigrants outwards and an incessant flow of disparate cultures inwards.
Anne is a native of Dun Laoghaire, that strange republic just to the north of us, but she has trod a global life, living for many years in Manhattan. Imagine her vision as spun from a web of those experiences; so in her poetry we may swim off the Forty Foot, see lightning strike the Empire State Building, soar momentarily amidst the constellations above and sink in the sombre caress of the chants of the monks of Glenstall Abbey.
There is much more besides, hidden hints of the personal are scattered amongst the cartography of global movements, buried treasure that you must seek with the scantest of clues. All human life is here, indeed the title poem namechecks Zanzibar, Big Tom and the Russian Revolution. Buy the book to get the full story!
xxharrison 