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Contents
Editorial Olive Broderick George Shaw Nuala Ní Chonchúir Fiona Ní Mhaoilior Gerald Dawe Feargal O’Malley Erin Rhoda Kate Dempsey Aoife Mannix George Shaw Maria Campbell Alyson Hallet Colin Darke Erin Rhoda Olive Broderick Tinka Bechert Alyson Hallet Maria Campbell Phillip Crymble George Shaw Conor McFeely Dominic Connell Marie Connole Gregory McCartney Nuala Ní Chonchúir Locky Morris Phillip Crymble Patricia Byrne Feargal O’Malley David Mohan Eileen Casey John Hegley
4 5 6 7 8 9 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 22 23 24 25 26 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 40
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Abridged Time
Round Dance
(Rhapsody on Carmina Burana)
Time as commodity. We ration it out amongst our friends, colleagues and families in order of preference. We resent ‘waste of time’ pursuits and we relish ‘time well spent’ as if we’re all arduously working towards an incentive of bonus minutes that we’ll collect before midnight. Our lives revolve around imaginary deadlines that we establish so that we can timetable enjoyment of life.
Those who go round and round - the inner workings of a clock wheels of seasons spin against each other.
There is not nearly ample enough space to ascertain when this newest evolution of time occurred. And if there was, the irony of this quest would be duly noted. In the mid-twentieth century, Levi Strauss coined the phrase ‘mythology of time’ in reference to the way in which historical events are reported and understood. He, in turn, uses earlier principles established by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure to ascertain how myths are propagated. This long-standing debate regarding the fluidity of time and language has numbered some of the greatest scholars among its participants. The problem with relying on such complex theories to shed light on our understanding of time and space is that a theory, once ingested, will hiccup and take you no further. As the old proverb says, you can take the theorist to the water but you can’t make them think. When it comes to understanding how the concept of time has evolved, the anthropologist, the linguist, the psychoanalyst will all offer varying hypothesis without ensuring our full understanding. In Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’, we are offered a glimpse into a world that exists outside of time, a venture that illuminates the time/space debate in ways that the aforementioned beardstroking theorists have missed. The absence of time results in the main characters, Estragon and Vladimir perpetuating the same routine every day without any deviation from their self-imposed task – to wait for Godot. Because time has ceased to matter, the notion of the passage of time in history has disintegrated to the extent that the crucifixion of Christ is discussed in glibly familiar terms. They list days in a nonsensical fashion with no application of logic so that their devotion to the task of ‘waiting for Godot’ becomes ever more meaningless. That is, meaningless to the audience, who exist within their own firmly established and comfortable realm of time and space. Overall, Beckett’s most interesting and elucidating commentary is on the relationship between time and memory. The only thing that Estragon and Vladimir are certain of is that they are waiting for Godot. Nothing else exists beyond or before that task. Therefore, logic would imply that time
Longed for Spring, Summer returns, the rigours of Winter withdraw. I am at the hour when wounds with weeping eyes dance. Where is the lover I once knew – happy and handsome, with the face of April? See how I am faithful. I am with you even when you are faraway. Whoever loves this much is spun on a wheel. I am a leaf played with by the wind. I am the fool who like the flowing stream never changes course. I take the easy path, I see bared teeth. I have the dark night buried deep in the depth of my heart. The memory of your face makes me weep a thousand times. I would like to be in the Order of Decius where no-one fears death. Here no-one fears death – not the wandering or the wise. My soul is dead and in the wavering balance of my feelings I yield to what I see. Arms, limbs, lips are everywhere. Still my lover does not come. I am heartened by a promise. New, new love is what I’m dying of.
and memory could be considered indivisible entities that must co-exist in order for either to function.
Olive Broderick
However, if the notion of time has now been exposed as a construct, then how does this affect the symbiotic relationship between time and memory? Time has become a vacuous space that we press ourselves into to give some semblance of order to our daily lives. We exploit the chronological timeline that is instinctively present within our framework of memories because we feel like it gives them further validity. The hazy, half-assembled memories of childhood become solidified by the application of a conceivable timeline. Life experience now relies on the evidentiary back-up of a time and date, a day or a season..
singing this corrosion…out staring the sea abridged is Maria Campbell (Editor) & Gregory McCartney (Project Coordinator) c/o Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry BT48 6PU Telephone 028 71266948 Email abridged@ymail.com
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An Unlucky Woman
I will pluck charms, dangle them from my neck and the headboard: rose-quartz beads and a silver turtle, a Síle-na-Gig with gaping lips. I will visit the rag tree at Clonfert, pin a baby’s soother to its trunk, carry a discreet pouch of hazelnuts, slip two gilded fish under our bed. I will wear a Saint Gerard scapular, the kind of thing that drips miracles, and just maybe this army of amulets will make my body do what it won’t.
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
George Shaw A Little Later, 2009 Humbrol enamel on board, 92 x 121 cm Courtesy of Anthony Wilkinson Gallery
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Prelude A boy at his bedroom window, in the morning, doing breathing exercises, the window is open and he is drawing in air, like a swimmer, his hands pressed against his narrow chest and he inhales deeply and slowly, making sure to hold his breath momentarily and then exhaling slowly. The scene before him has not changed since he moved to his grandmother’s with his mother and sister several years before when he was little more than a boy. Now he is turning into adolescence and the doctor has recommended these morning and last thing at night exercises to help him overcome the asthma attacks, which afflict him from time to time. The yard is long and narrow; at the far end by the back door there is a coalbunker, an outdoor lavatory. At the pantry door stands a wire mesh larder and next to it an old mangle for draining off excess water from the washing before it was hung up on the line to dry on Mondays. It’s rarely used. The laundry is collected on Wednesdays and delivered on Fridays. The milkman calls every day before the house stirs. The evening paper comes in just before six at night, the piano tuned by a blind man who appears each autumn, the hedges cut by a bald-headed Magwitch in spring; the house painted and decorated by Mr. Someone, the insurance man collects his premium Saturday nights. At the beginning, a gas lighter popped the street lamps on the pavement outside. Beyond the yard on the left is a row of houses, the backs of which – kitchens, bathrooms, windows – and gardens, run behind an entry that leads into a derelict site and the backs of more houses. Above this network of houses the streets rise into the chimneys of other houses, the sloping roofs, the telegraph poles, and the bright sky. Fiona Ni Mhalior Eleven O’ Clock , 1997 Detail of a drawing from a series of drawings entitled ‘Con el tiempo!’ Drawing,print and aluminium on paper. 36 cm x 26 cm
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He breathes again deeply and looks out, not really seeing anything beyond the wall of the landing and the spangled glass of the bathroom window. The red brick of the house next door seems to glow a little in the morning light. There is barely a breeze but little clouds carry across the view. He closes the window carefully and turns back into his room. Above his bed are pictures of motorcycles, the fireplace is empty and the large wardrobe next to it reflects the young man in the shadow of his room. The dressing table and the shelves in the nook of the chimneybreast are sparse of ornament. His dressing gown hangs on the back of the closed door. He looks absent-mindedly at himself in the long mirror of the wardrobe, pulls on his shoes and leaves the room to the sound of a couple of children running down the back lane, shouting and teasing one another. The rooms at the back of the house are in the shade where the grandfather clock strikes twelve. And then again. Gerald Dawe
Opposite page Feargal O’Malley Lurgan Photographic Print 2009
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Following Footsteps
Developing Shadows
At eight months pregnant, my mother stood
The sun sags in the sky
at the starting line of the Boston Marathon,
its feeble November heat a treat,
her long hair the color of old hay. My mind
fleeting on my winter face.
doesn’t remember the beat of her footsteps,
It has traced a path across the sea
but my body does. Four years later I sprinted,
straight to me.
streaming song down our road beneath umbrellas
of orange leaves. She was all flannel, humming
I squint at the glint.
off tune. In the winter she polished her face
A silhouette, my son stands
with Vaseline, and, returned from running,
hands clenched little man.
her eyelashes were frost daisies, and the ice chips
From the shoulder droop, stoop,
falling from her red scarf to the floor were chimes.
he is sulking.
We ran a race when I was twelve, and my sides
cramped til I was green and bent like a willow branch,
Stalking off gawky
but she stayed with me, urging me on. We crossed
to kick the ball free
the line last, shoulder to shoulder, but they marked her
along the strand,
one second slower than me. I finished my first marathon,
scuffs sand
and she wasn’t there. I was across the world beneath
to land in my face.
a violet sky in a stadium that shivered with butterflies.
I sat, my hands cupping my knees, fragile
He stares, glares defiant.
like sand dollars; they might have been her hands.
Don’t talk. Won’t.
Years later, the house as calm as cold milk,
He walks on, arms dangle,
I climbed under the blue sheets with my mother
head down, brain clicking,
who tucked her nose beneath my cheek. All sinew
time ticking on.
and lung, her frame as small as a child’s,
her breathing slowed in the rhythm of sleep.
The hard cold of the rock seeps through my cheap jeans. I stand and
Erin Rhoda
our shadows grow.
Kate Dempsey
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Medicine Man The morbid elegance of Charles Darwin’s walking stick. Its green reptilian eye winking at God, the skull that fits so reassuringly under the palm of your hand. Ivory dolls opening to reveal miniature internal organs. Sexual fantasies wrapped in tissue paper, the flexing of metallic limbs. After the museum closes, the Chinese doctor’s teeth chatter, as the staircase winds ever upwards in flashes of double helix dictionaries. Volumes with the letter n, other unknown shrunken heads, the chalk in our bones. If these skeletons could write their own skin in invisible ink, put back the flesh, the hair. The tapping of a heart upon a wooden floor, ghost limbs in glass cases. Rows of surgical knives, babies unborn. The flicking of a light switch, collecting a past that holds the starkness of our future. The hardness of human remains, mysterious burial rites. There are ghosts in the cement, questions tattooed on to bone. Building tomorrow unearths the city’s most secret chambers, a civilisation is remembered for how it treats its dead.
Aoife Mannix
George Shaw It Is Finished, 2008-9 Humbrol enamel on board 147.5 x 198 cm Courtesy of Anthony Wilkinson Gallery
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Greasy Spoon Conquest
Omoplatoscopy
As bacon spits fat on their thumbs
My love is the sun.
And the scent of coffee beans turns sour I shrink to nothing on their linoleum.
It burns your shoulder,
Words spring from slackened morning jaws
razors through flesh to bone.
And find their way through layers of thickened skin To pin my sleep-sore soul to the floor.
A mesh of black cracks appear.
Spoon on saucer like steel on my spine Corroding my blood as milk smothers tea.
Sketch of wing and fin, structures designed for flight or swimming.
Sanctuary lies in the nook under your chin In the curve of broad shoulders
Yours then, an ability to rise above
Unpick their cruel hooks from my skin Peel off this stale layer of guilt
this ambered drop of time, eyes peeled back
And envelop me in you.
to the stars and seas that spawned them.
Then I will not swallow cups of derision
Bird man. Fish man. The swirl of dust before man.
I will no longer trade tealeaves for tears. Pepper my flesh with verbal bullets,
A future so full of the past there’s no
Speak of me in snake-pitched tones
divining evolution from dream.
Behind greasy counters of lonely haunts, Thrash my name around smokers’ alleys, Just know that I have paid my tab Sweaty notes sleep in your till.
Maria Campbell
Alyson Hallet
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Hope Seeds
“Ghana is cocoa; cocoa is Ghana” – Ghanaian saying
I pressed my cheek to my mother’s back as she carried me into the bush outside Kumasi, the cloth pulled tight and knotted beneath her breasts, a machete in her hand, an empty bucket balanced atop her cropped hair. Her pulse sounded in my ears like the throb of a distant city. She piled the green, ripe cocoa pods until she built a steeple on her head. Later she spread the pulp to sweat on the cement until the time was right to take the seeds and dry and rake them in the sun. Then she took my hands, and we walked barefoot over the seeds to soften them. This is how I learned to walk. If you walk on cocoa seeds, daughter, no path will be too rough, and I thought that anything left in the sun would become like the sun: the beans that turned golden, the white laundry that bleached as it dried on the rocks. Like spiders we made our home facing the rising light, but growing up my skin got darker, and one day my neighbor stretched me out—it was the floor— his sweat and alcohol crushing my breath, the stain a spreading shadow, and the dew dripped from my mouth. Beyond me women pounded cassava in their wooden bowls, and somewhere my mother wrenched the chocolate fruit from the tree, the oblong pods a force driving her into the ground. Sunlight took its turn on every wall.
Erin Rhoda
Opposite - Colin Darke, Black Square on Black Drawing, 2009
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A City Break with my sisters; and Kafka
Dedicated to Ian Sansom
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On Wednesday everyone we meet is out of sorts and we think that we have outstayed our welcome. We bide our time at the unexpected Dali exhibition which is joined to a series of photos of the painter from Autumn ‘69 by a well-known
Les aiguilles de l’horloge du quartier juif vont à rebours
Et tu recules aussi dans ta vie lentement
Zone Apollinaire
Czech Photographer; and I am delighted to see in its original The Persistence of Memory, but it’s his little Minotaurs that hold my attention. Suddenly one of us notices that all the clocks - even the little comrades on street corners – are out of sync, and it sets us to wonder who keeps time in this city.
All reality is virtual: and on the first night we have a meal in the small square that would have taken us to the centre of the tourist part of Prague – if we had known that it was there. On the second day we fail to arrive on time for any introductory tour, and at ten in the evening we stand in the middle of a crowd of tourists gazing at the Astronomical Clock in the Town Square and wondering as the time goes by whether we have or have not seen whatever it is that is supposed to happen. On Saturday we are still disoriented and slow to discover why there is no activity around the Old Jewish Cemetery. On Sunday we have almost caught up with ourselves arriving just past noon at the Mass in English at the Church of the Infant de Prague which is filled with people from every nation and we hear the story of Jeremiah in the Cistern and the Indian Priest explains - with a brief review of most recent wars and past incursions –
On the second last day we take a tour and discover that the mechanism of the Astronomical Clock is switched off at 9pm; and I am the only one who has memories of the Velvet Revolution; but we all notice that it isn’t until we arrive at the Holocaust Museum that our guide seems to realise that she has just recited a catalogue of bloodshed: and caught in every crossfire - innocents. And one of my sisters is still quietly working out the quickest route back to our hotel which, I notice, means we get to see different but often not very noteworthy parts of the city. In the departure lounge we stand in line waiting; watching the sky change and the hint of an electric storm approaching. An airhostess dashes past clutching her wrist watch, disappears into the cabin of our aircraft. We return home: the setting sun shot through
that the ideal thing from the Gospel is not Nation against Nation but Brother against Brother and for a moment I think I can make sense of the argument. We debate often whether a week is too long to spend in a city; and there are clocks everywhere. From the showy astrolabe in the Town Square with its Medieval intimations you can tell the time it would have been in Babylon; and that the sun is in the last degrees of its own sign in the Zodiac, all framed in a gold circle. And every other building has one: the Cathedral, the Castle, on every street corner the functional remnants of Communism - to ensure that people were never late for work - one sister remembers that somebody had explained to her during a recent weekend break in Riga. At the Kafka exhibition it all begins to make sense – especially where it says that he said that (…) he lived his life in a circle and I stare a very long time at the bracketed ellipsis thinking it is intended as a porthole to another time – a dark morning, gaslit, a distressed child and his nursemaid (but for very different reasons) leaving the Jewish Quarter travelling clockwise crossing onto Charles Bridge and the nurse’s hands wet from peeling the snivelling boy off every railing, and all the while willing them to get back to the safety of home. I return to our hotel in the opposite direction.
Olive Broderick
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Sueño - Café Madoka, Guadalajara. If it were possible to go back in time I’d translate this recording of flesh into a fish, sashay through liquid air towards the mustachioed man in the chair to my right. The tickle of my tail on his watermelon belly, the switch of his startled hand as he brushes me away or, more likely, cradles me in the pool of his palm and wonders if he forgot to wake up this morning.
Alyson Hallet
Tinka Bechert Modern Day Mixed Media on Canvas, 40 cm x 42 cm
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King’s Cross – Tuesday Morning
Answer Print
Hail storm of heels breaking on steel capped steps:
Noah’s human herd is marching to a hoofed beat
Imagine Waiting for Godot staged as a Western. Warren Oates.
Futility. A kind of stock-in-trade. The jailor’s brace of keys.
Leading them to that hallowed wrought iron gate. They spill like twisted entrails from the underground
Cock-fighting roosters. Stone. A face that toils close to stone.
Onto pavements slick with morning rain and gum.
Think of GTO as time. Sounds pretentious. It all amounts
The space they stare into is dust-mite territory, Someone might expire in that thin air.
I march on, keeping time and hoarding it.
prologues. What it means to be erased. Leopoldo Torre
The girl outside the station is the property of Euston Road,
to letting go. Our darlings. Try directing Robert Blake. TV
Nilsson. A close-up of a dead man’s feet. No more Japanese.
It’s candy. Lew Teague’s post-production gore shots. Tarantino.
Rivulets of damp brown curls, scent of summer fruits London has spent itself inside her.
She probes these blank carcasses for meaning
caviar and baby eels. A form of punctuation. Hop a freighter
The beheading scene. Network traffic cops take orders. Eat
Forgetting the protocol, forgetting the vacuity! They see nothing and yield her no answers.
to the Philippines. Beat the devil. What the great films teach.
Buck up dear, there’s a beat to be kept
Inch dailies through a viewer. A number with two threes. No
And you are already falling behind.
good. A dream of passion. Just a feeling inside Martindale’s.
Tomorrow. Next week. 30 years. What difference does it make? Maria Campbell Phillip Crymble
Centre Spread – George Shaw No Returns, 2009 Humbrol enamel on board, 147.5 x 198 cm’ Courtesy Anthony Wilkinson Gallery
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Note to Self And wait for what exactly? More money, better weather? Remember, on the ward, the man-machine that breathed a noise like something steam-powered? A glassed-in concertina moved up and down, stopping just briefly at full stretch, and even as you stole your look at him its rhythm, the tiny pause it took each time, ate into you. What if it stopped?
What if it didn’t stop? His pulse nudged him around as if to taunt him. Time, systolic, diastolic, is here and will not wait.
Dominic Connell
Conor McFeely From the series Go West 2009
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Re-Creationism Failing to find warmth In the embers of night I track memories Neanderthal They snarl and turn Vicious in their clarity Yet I hunt them down Knowing there’s meat On myth and mud A thin primordial soup Transparent and tasteless Sustains my starvation In this void emaciated Half – formed things Evolve, gain fangs Roam in foetal packs The opaque and odious planes Of pre-dawn insomnia Yet I feed on them As they consume me We larvae of lucidity All teeth and tongue Translucent and foul Instruments of creation
Gregory McCartney
Marie Connole, Patience Watercolour on paper, 25 x 21.5cm, 2008
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Lumière Noir Sunday in Kilchreest, a car drives into the graveyard, stops. The driver stands, head cocked, questioning a headstone. Her car door is swung wide, ready for the get-away. Cows cluster on hills, daffodils ruffling their ankles, waiting. II The beads on the lampshade make a skull of the light bulb. It gapes down at me in my bath, a put-together memento mori. My mind lives under a gaslight hardly letting in mortality’s possibility. But tonight, under this lumière noir, I accept death – the other side
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
Locky Morris, Regal Filter Photograph, 2009
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Compote of Apples Plug in the IBM Selectric. Find the pencils and correcting
tape. Ranch hogs. Walk out on movies. Catch your limit.
Bite your fingernails. Eat Cracker Jacks for breakfast, lunch
and dinner. Buy George Dickel by the case. Stay up all night
with Robert Creely. Stop for burgers at the Tastee-Freez. Sift
rat shit out of flour. Jam a bit between your teeth. Make
a point about cremation. Watch the farm report. Wear size 13s.
Set timers for the radio and lights. Take a dozen golden pippins.
Pare them nicely. Scald. Put on Jolene. Wash up. Use outsize
bars of soap. Reduce. Let stand. Then bottle close. Repeat.
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Island Woman
Achill Island, January 2009
The waves are quiet on Pollawaddy strand at the end of the valley under Slievemore quiet after the battering of last night’s wind the dawn a medley of black ground and trees at the slopes of Krunnick. I recall the island woman who married, moved inland, died young. In the room with the chimney breast she turned her face to the wall and cried on her death-bed. Was it a cry for island waves and gulls and winds?
——— for Richard Brautigan
Sounds like a tuning fork
Phillip Crymble
vibrating at a cave mouth.
Patrica Byrne
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Hourglass Clearing the kitchen I find your antique hourglass two glass bulbs connected by a narrow tube where time ran freely in both directions.
I turn it over presently
to hear it begin
a selected passage
in whispers
from time’s endless
narrative, the sound much
like the hiss of turning pages.
The sand flows back and forth
according to how I turn
it in my hand,
is full
or almost full,
of little minutes, a lifespan full
of sand grains trapped in glass.
Feargal O’Malley, Cold Room Photographic Print, 2008
David Mohan
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Damage
Damage
As we slept the moon split open – spilling
Woken by sounds of blown out glass, a busted car horn bleating, under yellow streetlight
Woken by sounds of blown out glass,
we were a confusion of limbs, pale hands fisting,
We were a confusion of limbs, pale hands fisting.
furry slippers, dressing gowns pulled tight.
Firemen came, un-winding news-reels -
Firemen came, un-winding news-reels, miles of it hissed over scorched metal.
A million icy crystals over rooftops On the sandpapery texture of the burnt out car
When things quietened down we went back to bed.
Blackened daffodils – As we slept the moon split open - spilling Miles of it hissing over scorched metal.
a million icy crystals over rooftops
Heavy enough to stick.
glancing off smoke misted bricks,
Skid across fresh laid track.
blackened daffodils –
This unexpected fall sprouted stubble, Under its flipped up bonnet;
heavy enough to stick.
Any moment might roar to life Glancing off smoke misted bricks.
On the sandpapery texture of the burnt out car this unexpected fall sprouted stubble,
When things quietened down we went back to bed
as if still the engine was ticking over
Furry slippers, dressing gowns pulled tight.
under its flipped up bonnet;
As if still the engine was ticking over A busted car horn bleating, under yellow streetlight.
might, any moment, roar to life Skid across fresh laid track.
Eileen Casey
Eileen Casey
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WHAT AM I?
Occasionally I am stood still but it don’t mean I’m easy to fill I am something you pass and I lengthen the grass and I’m not always easy to fill. I’m Time.
Contributors
Contributors Tinka Bechert was born in 1975, in Berlin, Germany. She lives in Sligo, Ireland and Berlin, Germany. Her work has been exhibited in many countries, including Ireland, UK, Germany, Austria, Brazil and Canada. Recent Awards include the Irish Arts Councils’ Banff Residency Award, the realisation of an Artists’ Book published in Berlin by Mariannenpresse and a Sligo County Council Arts Bursary. Tinka Becherts’ work is held in international collections such as the Office of Public
For a time, doing rhyme in the gaol and hoping the time doesn’t fail to help to reshape and provide an escape without touching the Chubb or the Yale. John Hegley
Works, Ireland, the Central Library/ Archives, Berlin, Germany (Staatsbibliothek Berlin), the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Tate Britain, London. Olive Broderick is working towards the publication of her first collection ‘Night Divers’. She is currently in receipt of an Arts Council NI grant. Poems published 2009, Sunday Tribune ‘New Irish Writing’ and Ulla’s Nib Spring issue. She has an MA in Creative Writing, QUB. From Co. Cork originally, she is now based in Downpatrick and is an active member of the Write! Down writers and artists collective. Patricia Byrne lives in Limerick, Ireland, and is a graduate of the MA Writing programme from NUI Galway. Her fiction, poetry and nonfiction have been published widely in journals and anthologies including The SHOp, The Stony Thursday Book, Southword, First Edition (UK), Swarthmore Literary Review (USA), Ropes, Boyne Berries, Cuirt Annual, Revival, Scottish Book Trust Anthology and New Hibernia Review (USA). She is a member of the Atlantis Collective of Irish writers whose short fiction collection Town of Fiction was recently launched at Galway’s Cuirt International Festival of Literature. Eileen Casey, originally from the Midlands, now based in South Dublin,her work is widely published. She has shown three poetry in public places installations. Awards include The Oliver Goldsmith, Sciarsceal, A.I.B./Westport People, Listowel Writers Week, Cootehill, The Moore Medallion,among others. Twice short listed for a Sunday Tribune Hennessy Award, ‘Drinking the Colour Blue’, her debut collection was published in 2008 by New Island. Dominic Connell lives in County Kildare and has published/pending poems in Crannog, Boyne Berries and The Stinging Fly. Marie Connole is a graduate of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and NUI Galway/ Burren College of Art. In 2007 she was one of four artists selected by board members of 126 Galway to take part in an experimental exhibition titled ‘U Complete Me’. In 2008 she was artistin-residence at the Kilkenny Arts Office and at SĺM, the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists, in Reykjavík.. Her work is in the collections of AXA Insurance, Wesley College Dublin, 126 and the Kilkenny Arts Office. She is a member of the Ground Up Artists’ Collective. Phillip Crymble’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Cuirt Annual, The North, Succour, Brand, Iota, The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian & Irish Verse, and numerous other publications worldwide. In 2007 he read in Poetry Ireland’s annual Introductions series in Dublin. Wide Boy, his first short collection, was recently released by Lapwing, Belfast.
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Colin Darke lived in Derry from 1988 until he moved to Belfast last year, to research a PhD at the
Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in Galway. Her third short fiction collection Nude will be published by
University of Ulster. He has exhibited in Derry, throughout Ireland, in Europe and America. With
Salt in Sep 2009. She has poems and an essay in The Watchful Heart – A New Generation of Irish
his work he attempts to explore the relationships between art, ideology and history.
Poets, edited by Joan McBreen (Salmon, 2009). Nuala was chosen by The Irish Times as a writer to watch in 2009. Website www.nualanichonchuir.com
Gerald Dawe’s most recent collection, Points West (2008) is published by Gallery Press. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin.
Fiona Ní Mhaoilir, born in Dublin studied Fine Art in Dublin, Cork and Belfast where she now lives. A former director of Catalyst Arts she is currently working on a PhD at the University of
Kate Dempsey has had poems placed and published in various publications in Ireland and in
Ulster(Belfast) she has received numerous awards and exhibited nationally and internationally.
UK and in competitions including The Hennessy New Irish Writing in the Sunday Tribune, Poetry
Most recent commission is ‘Play Space’ for the Grove Health and Well Being Centre, commissioned
Ireland, The Shop, Coffeehouse, Abridged and Grist. She was also selected to read for Poetry
by the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust.
Ireland Introductions and Windows Publications Introductions as well as at Electric Picnic Music and Arts Festival.
Feargal O’ Malley was born in 1976, and grew up in Lurgan, N.Ireland. Since attending the University Of Ulster, Feargal has worked in arts management/curation for the last five years. The
Alyson Hallett has been Visiting Writer at the University of the West of England and writer-in-
majority of his work deals with distinctions between what is real and what is perceived. Exploring
residence for South West Arts. Her latest book of poems is The Stone Library (Peterloo Poets). More
place, memory and the links between past and present.
details of her work can be seen at www.thestonelibrary.com and on October 13th, BBC Radio 4 will be broadcasting a programme about her work with stones (Nature: Migrating Stones).
Erin Rhoda of Washington, Maine is earning her M.Phil. in creative writing at Trinity College Dublin as a George J. Mitchell Scholarship recipient. Erin is a 2006 summa cum laude graduate of
John Hegley is a singer poet, potato-dancer and glancer through bi-focal spectacles. Has appeared
Colby College in Maine, USA.
previously in The Chancer, ancestor of Abridged. New very thin volume available from Donut Press-tales in French and English, concerning man with dog called Chirac
George Shaw in Spring 2009 held a solo exhibition Woodsman at Wilkinson Gallery London. Other recent exhibitions include Solo shows, The End of the World, Galerie Hussenot Paris, and Poets
Aoife Mannix is an Irish poet and writer based in London. Her first novel Heritage of Secrets was
Day, Centre d’Art Contemporian, Geneva, and What I did This Summer, Ikon Gallery Birmingham,
published by Lubin & Kleyner in 2008. She is the author of four collections of poetry; The Trick of
Newlyn Art Gallery and Dundee Centre of Contemporary Art. Group exhibitions include Master
Foreign Words (2002), The Elephant in the Corner (2005), Growing Up An Alien (2007) and Turn The
Printer, Tate St Ives, Cornwall, Idle youth, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York and You Dig the
Clocks Upside Down (2008) – all with Tall Lighthouse. In 2009, she released a CD with musician
Tunnel, I’ll Hide the Soil, White Cube, London. Forthcoming exhibitions in 2010 include a group
Janie Armour of their Phrased & Confused commission ‘Different Words For Snow’. Her short
show at Gagosian Gallery, London.
stories are included in the anthologies Tell Tales Volume 3 (2006), Small Voices, Big Confessions (2006) and Westside Stories (2003). See www.aoifemannix.com for more information or have a listen at www.myspace.com/aoifemannixandjaniearmour . Conor McFeely was born in Derry N.Ireland, where he now lives and works. He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. He is a recipient of The Curated Visual Arts Award 2007
Abridged Personnel
(curated by Mike Nelson) resulting in two major solo shows of new work called “The Case of the Midwife Toad (the unrepeatable experiment)” in The Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin 2007 and at Void,
Maria Campbell is Abridged Editor. Maria is currently in the final stages of her doctoral thesis and
Derry 2008, and “The Testing Rooms/Smashing Forms” a site specific audio and video installation
divides her time between panic induced nausea and hedonistic pursuits of happiness. She will
at The Maze Prison 2008. Much of this work can be seen at www.mentalimage.org.uk
take the edge of an academic career with as many forays into the poetic world as is financially viable.
David Mohan is based in Dublin and writes poetry and short stories. He has won the Oxfam Poetry Competition (twice), been published in The Sunday Tribune, Revival and the 2008 anthology Night
Gregory McCartney is Abridged Project Coordinator, freelance exhibition maker, North West Visual
and Day. His work has been read on The Arts Programme. He has also won the Hennessy XO
Arts Archive coordinator, PhD researcher, and poet. He wishes to recreate the court of the Sun
Writer of the Year Award for 2008.
King.
Locky Morris was born in Derry (1960) where he continues to live and work. He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. In 2008 he had a solo show at the Manheimmer Kunstverein in Germany. Forthcoming projects in 2010 include a large retrospective at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast and the RCC in Donegal, Ireland. His work is a forensically close examination of the everyday shot through with a sense of absurdity and references to the history of art.
Cover Image: George Shaw The End of Time, 2008-9; Humbrol enamel on board 147.5 x 198 cm Courtesy Of Anthony Wilkinson Gallery
Abridged is a division of the Chancer Corporation 2009. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission. Copyright remains with the authors and artists. Printed by the Verbal Arts Centre, Derry Tel: 028 71266946 www.verbalartscentre.co.uk
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