The Poetry Circle, a new series brought to you by the Limerick Writers’ Centre. This series is called The Poetry Circle in honour of the Great Limerick Poet, Desmond O Grady, who first formed and read his work at a reading, also called The Poetry Circle, in 1954 at the White House Bar on O Connell St, in Limerick. We bring you excellent poetry from Stan Notte and Faye Boland.

Stanley Notte is an entrepreneur, MC, DJ, speaker, writer and poet whose work has appeared Writer’s Magazine, The Galway Review, Stanza’s Monthly Chapbook’s, O’Bheal anthologies, Cork’s Evening Echo and been featured on RedFM (Cork), Soho Radio London and Lagan Online’s Poetry Day Ireland Mix Tape.
As a spoken word artist Stanley has appeared at a variety of festivals and Slam Poetry events throughout Ireland. These include Body and Soul, Indiependence, It Takes A Village and Bare In The Woods.

Stanley’s poems are predominantly written using song titles of a chosen artist. In addition to performing Slam Poetry, Stanley also performs and records with The Lost Gecko, a guitar and cello duo.

As a mental health advocate he has performed in Cork Prison, corporate health awareness events, and was a featured speaker at ‘The Changing Man’ Tedx event in Jan 2017.
His poetry film Peter and the Wolf – Alladin Sane? (After David Bowie) was short listed at the Cork Indie Film Festival in 2016, screened at the Dublin Bowie Festival in January 2017, and long listed at the Rabbit Heart Festival 2018.

In 2017 Stanley was chosen to perform in the UK as part of the Twin Cities cultural exchange between O’Bheal (Cork) and Fire and Dust (Coventry).

Stanley is the co-founder and curator of Soltice Sounds, a bi-annual magazine that is Ireland’s only regular spoken word publication.

Faye Boland’s poetry has been described as “a happy combination of musical lyricism and intellectual subtlety” by well-known Irish poet and novelist, Brendan Kennelly.

The poem from which this collection takes its title was Overall Winner at the 2017 Hanna Greally International Literary Awards, organised as part of the annual SiarScéal Festival in Co. Roscommon. It is also from this that the present volume results, as the prize, on this occasion, was for the winner to have his or her book published professionally by The Manuscript Publisher, an Irish-based publishing services provider.

In her citation of Boland’s winning entry, the adjudicator at the awards, Mary Melvin Geoghegan, drew attention to the author’s “economy and freshness of language”, which she describes as “riveting – words forming as scaffold to arrest the eye and ear” –

My roof is the sky,
the wind my walls.
Every night it blows
the same words:
Homeless.
Homeless.

Poet Eileen Sheehan describes Boland’s poetry (“recounted from an eclectic range of perspectives”) as charting “a restless search for home, for purpose in an era when people feel increasingly disconnected from their own sense of worth.”

So, where does one find that sense of self-worth? Our ability to connect is one place to start looking or so this collection of poetry might appear to suggest: the ability to receive and to acknowledge human distress signals, rather than trying to shut them out. Also, from the pleasure to be found in the mundane, reminding us that we are all somehow connected, no matter how dispersed and disparate our lives become.

Acoustic guitar wizard Shane Bond will provide musical interludes.