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KAREN J MCDONNELL’s writing has been published in many countries in anthologies and journals, including Vital Signs: Poems of Illness and Healing (Poetry Ireland), Rochford Street Review, Gondal Heights (Sybaritic Press), The Storms 4 — Dublin Days, Drawn to the Light, Boyne Berries, The North, New Irish Writing, and The Irish Times. Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominated, her work has been awarded several bursaries and writers’ residencies. Collaborations include the 32 Poets for Ireland podcast, Labellit project, Poems Meet Painters, the Clare Poetry Collective, Poetry Jukebox and Poetry as Commemoration. She has performed her work at many festivals and on radio, including the much-loved Sunday Miscellany. Her first collection, This Little World, was also published by Doire Press. karenjmcdonnell.com
This is a book infused with insight and mythic assurance; a book of intuitions made loud and voices marked by vision, the work of a poet who will be read for her adeptness in tracing the heartlines of human experience…
— Martin Dyar
Mending
Time to repair
covered tin buttons and lace inserts
barely saved by fraying stitches.
A pillowslip’s embellishments
strained to breaking point by shoulder blades
sliding down for love.
Or — years supporting an invalid
or a bedtime reader.
I’m no seamstress
but a love of worn things makes me
thread a needle
following old pinpoints
on this cotton square of history.
Something hovers
close as a pen to paper
while I do my mending.
The High Road
High summer and, below,
fields, like offcuts on
a weaver’s floor.
A dream, I thought,
until my father spoke
of the view from an old
Burren way. Confirming
memory, and his stubbornness
in choosing the stony road.
Shell Gathering
Coming home from the funeral
we stop in the hot day
for ice-cream at Crusheen.
The sun hammers down.
A day for the beach and shell gathering.
No weather for heat-seeking black.
Out on the Mare Nostrum, an Israeli eye
scans a Gaza beach
where children play football.
A held breath.
A lining up of crosshairs.
Slight pressure on the fingerpad.
The air shivers, but the sea remains calm.
Shells whoosh in, shredding the children.
And their fathers run, to gather them in.
Berlin. May Day. 1945
Magda Goebbels, having killed her children,
steps into the room and lays out her cards.
She brushes a blonde wisp from her forehead
and begins a game of Patience. It is hard
to fathom what she contemplates. Queen on King.
Her hands wage war with colour. Red upon Black.
Magda thinks of tooth fairies. She is hearing
small teeth rasp as the glass capsules crack.
Out in the cold Berlin morning she stands.
She swallows cyanide drenched in their names.
Her thoughts are drowning in snapshots and
home-movies spliced into split-second frames.
She clasps Hedda’s milk tooth — a final treasure.
Magda’s husband shoots her — for good measure.
ISBN: 978-1-915877-04-8 | Pages:72 | Year published: 2025
Tidal is the second poetry collection by west of Ireland poet Karen J McDonnell. Her poems explore the tropes and roles we impose on memory and history: what we commemorate, what we choose to remember, how age affects viewpoints. McDonnell is interested in how form — and also erasure and found poems — can be used in approaching historical events and biographical themes; excavating both universal and personal responses to our tiny, huge, lonely, ugly, beautiful world.
This book is available for pre-orders only. Pre-orders will be sent out mid-September.
ISBN: 978-1-907682-51-3 | Pages: 64 | Published: 2017
This Little World focuses both on the internal subjective world that we inhabit due to social media and 24/7 access to news sources, as well as the little worlds we create for ourselves in our relationships with family, friends and ‘the other’. Karen’s poems respond to the past and the immediate, the personal and the global, including the current plight of Syrian refugees.