Last, but not least, we come to the 11th shortlisted poet, all read and selected from many more fine submissions, by our judge for this year, Emily Berry. We will be announcing the winner on the 7th of May.
Dr Victoria Kennefick (pictured) is a
native of Shanagarry, Co. Cork. She was
a receipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in 2007 and completed her PhD in
Literature at University College Cork in 2009. Her poems have been published in
The
Stinging Fly, Southword, Wordlegs, The Weary
Blues and Abridged.
She won the Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize in
2013 and was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize 2013 and the Gregory
O'Donoghue Poetry Prize 2014. She
was selected to read as part of the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series
2013 and at the Cork Spring Poetry Festival Emerging Writers Reading in
February 2014. Now living and working in
Kerry, she is a member of the Listowel Writers' Week committee and
co-coordinator of its New Writers' Salon, as well coordinating the
recently established Kerry Women Writers' Network. She is the recipient of the Cill Rialaig
/Listowel Writers' Week Residency Award 2014 and has just been granted a
Bursary from Kerry County Council.
Lent
stroke
the smooth chocolate egg beneath,
the
one that we couldn’t eat.
The
wafer, yes, but no ice-cream.
Little
Jesuses in the desert for forty days
and
nights, with no dessert.
The
devil tapping on our flat-black
window
pane before bed;
mother,
cutting tiny slices of bread
in
the corner, eating from doll plates.
She
couldn’t be prouder of our ecstasy
of
denial, little letter-box lips refusing
all
the sins of the tongue.
Easter
bells rattled the glass,
Christ
has risen, Alleluia.
We
had the Resurrection with chocolate sauce.
It
made us sick and giddy, pupils
rising
in our irises, yours
the
most divine Holy-Mary blue.
We
held hands and spun around,
fizzy-headed
and falling down.
Open
the chocolate box, sister, and see
the
liquor-filled grown-up sweets.
Pillows
of sin, filled with
the
seven deadly tastes, a menu
read
to us on waking.
In
the Ordinary Time of your dark kitchen,
we
drop tissuey tea bags into boiling water.
Rust
whispers to transparency.
Peace
blooms,
bleeding
into
molecules,
slowly.
poem COPYRIGHT POET 2014
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