-
Spring 2023 Released
Featuring poetry & prose from across the world, this quarterly includes new work by Nuala O’Connor, the late Kevin Higgins, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Gráinne Daly, Derville Quigley, Elizabeth Power, John Noonan, Michael Begnal, & Katie Harper Garrett. Read the current issue here.
-
Winter 2022 Released
Featuring poetry & prose from across the world, this quarterly includes new work by Alicia Byrne Keane, Kate Smyth, Ian Irwin, Beth Storey, Julie Breathnach-Banwait, Carrie Griffin, Mary Madec, & Jimmy Kerr. Read Issue #4 here.
-
Some Days The Bird
Back in September, when Trasna released its Fall 2022 issue, we were delighted to include among the work a unique collaboration between American poet Heather Bourbeau and Irish-Australian poet Anne Casey. Over the course of a full year, each poet had written a poem to the other in alternating weeks. What resulted was a wonderful collection of 52 poems in conversation with each other from across the globe and seasons. You can read about the genesis for this project in an Irish Times interview. With gratitude to Heather and Anne, we include below their readings of the two poems published here in Trasna, and invite you to order their collection…
-
Fall 2022 Released
Featuring poetry and short fiction from across the world, this quarterly includes new work by Anne Casey & Heather Bourbeau, Diarmuid Cawley, Heather Corbally Bryant, Martin Simms, Máire T. Robinson, and Daragh Fleming. Read Issue #3 here.
-
Summer 2022 Released
Featuring poetry, an essay, and short fiction from across the world, the second quarterly of Trasna includes new work by Brittany Nohra, Nathanael O’Reilly, John Martin, Eugene O’Hare, Samuel Meyler, Fred Johnston, Shane O’Neill, and Linda Whittenberg. Read Issue #2 here.
-
Playground of the Apocalypse
by Shane O’Neill The strand is ravaged by the storm that had raged for two days, uprooting weeds and hurling rocks huge distances along the beach. Large chunks of sand have been torn away by the sea, leaving small dunes and bunkers for us to traverse unsteadily. The sky is still a heavy grey and we have to squint through the watery haze of falling rain and fight against the fierce winds. Black clouds are reflected in the tumultuous waters and barren black mountains tower over us. Tiny mussels are clamped to these monoliths, holding on tight against the forces of nature. In this deathscape, the natural elements blend into…
-
A Review of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry
by Lind Grant-Oyeye A common theme in reviews of her poetry is that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s work is not restricted to space or time but shifts between realms and places. In the Dublin Review, Gerard Smyth characterizes the poet as one who shifts from the material world to the otherworld [1]. She is portrayed as focusing on the metaphysical, translating experiences between worlds. Accordingly, readers new to her poetry might expect texts bursting with paranormal experiences. Her latest book Collected Poems (Wakefield Press, 2021) comprises work spanning over four decades with some new poems included. Assembling nine books into a single volume seems ambitious at first glance; however, it provides…
-
The everyday poetry of the half-wild North-Western Irish world
Keith Brennan The ripple of birdsong has spread from the far valley and broken across the farm. If spring moves at a walking pace then perhaps the birdsong walks with it. Where we are, with the farm backed up against Hawthorn Hill, facing north, it sometimes walks a little slower still. Across the hill and down the valley, where the farms face into the sun, the birds arrived last week. These fields fringed three rows deep with hazel and willow. The spruce forest spends itself finally, after a hundred acres of quiet, dense, commercial tree farm, giving way to the cattle-farmed hills. Rolling open fields fringed with native trees. Cattle…
-
First Quarterly Issue of Trasna Released
With poems and stories by Libby Hart, Stephen O’Connor, Mike Gallagher, S. C. Flynn, Marie O’Shea and Shane Leavy. Read Issue #1 here.
-
Patrick Kavanagh: a Reader’s Experience
by Richard Hayes For generations of Irish readers—for this one certainly—the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh is inextricably associated with Soundings, the anthology of prescribed poetry for the Leaving Certificate English curriculum that was a staple of Irish secondary education from the end of the 1960s until the mid-1990s. Edited with sensitivity and skill by the late Augustine (“Gus”) Martin, then professor of English at University College Dublin, Soundings presented the poetry curriculum for the final exam with unashamed emphasis on the texts of the poems, without recourse to illustrations or photographs or that patronising commentary that seems to dominate textbooks now. Martin in his introduction to the book speaks of…
