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Breda Wall Ryan

Biography

BREDA WALL RYAN grew up on a farm in Co. Waterford and now lives in Co. Wicklow. She has an M. Phil. in Creative Writing (Distinction) from Trinity College. Her awarded fiction has appeared in The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2006 – 07 and The New Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction. She was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions Series 2014 and is a founding member of Green Kite Writers and Hibernian Poetry and a trustee of Bray Literary Festival. Among her awards are iYeats Poetry Prize, Poets Meet Painters, Dromineer Poetry Prize, Over the Edge New Writer of the Year, The Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize and The Dermot Healy Poetry Award. Her collection In a Hare’s Eye (Doire Press, 2015) was awarded the Shine/Strong Poetry Award.

Genre: Poetry

Number of publications: 3

Winner of the 2016 Shine/Strong Award

Breda Wall Ryan bears witness to her own vulnerable life, to the lives of others, to the life of the world — and to all that she sees, even in the darkest places, she brings the light of her careful attention.

— Paula Meehan

Sample Work

Sample Poem From These are My People

These are My People

This rock is the mountain’s bone,
the mountain that carries the river
that tumbles stone to the distant ocean.
My bones sing with the cadence of water,
the mineral sparkle of rock.

A trodden path guides me towards woods
where pine martens prowl,
red squirrels strip pine cones.
Gulls forage in a plough-pleated field,
reminder of the ocean just beyond sight.
A heron stalks trout in the stream.

Nightfall. Rabbit and hare retreat
from the hunting fox. I start
at the vixen’s shriek, leave the dark
to the trees, to flickering moths,
roosting blackbirds and munching slugs.

Even without a name, or inkling
of where my roots lie,
I would know this place.
Let me be blackbird, squirrel,
heron and fish, river, rock and night-fox.
These are my people.

Here Maps are Useless

Forget cartography, calculate instead
the weight of light,

the heat of burnt-out stars,
the heft of time,

the space between love
and its perception.

Night stills the trees,
the ocean quivers, waits

for the river’s penetration.
Down by the lake

signposts written in fog
dissolve memory.

Silence assembles, snags
on a place outside experience.

Sample Poem From Raven Mothers

Merbaby

The match made between them never worked:
acres held back, separate houses
until old bones brought them
under one roof.

Gran favours green:
glossed walls, doors, chairs. Silences.
Sour apples lean over the corrugated fence
that hangs green shadows at the window.

Granda brings The Irish Press,
asks her for the headlines.
He can’t make head or tail,
never mastered book-learning.

She holds the paper high, a silent screen
between her and the clock’s relentless tock.
His blackthorn walking-stick taps impatience.

Stopping home, a man might stifle;
there’s nothing for him but go
to Mary Ann’s without the news.

When she marries Granda, the small girl says,
she’ll read his paper; paint
the whole house white.

Writer Website

www.bredawallryan.com

Reviews

Review of In a Hare's Eye in The Irish Times, 2016

Review of Raven Mothers in the Irish Times, 2019

Review of These are My People in Skylight 47

Review of These are My People in the Irish Times

A reading of 'Dreamless' by Breda Wall Ryan

Books

Raven Mothers

Raven Mother Poetry Book by Breda Wall Ryan published by Doire Press

ISBN: 978-1-907682-65-0 | Pages: 88 | Published: 2018

With the world on the brink of environmental and social upheaval, Raven Mothers explores — via the prism of the feminine and with a supple and instinctive control of language — the concept of maternity in all its manifestations, from Mother Earth, through Eve to Everywoman and her Outsider sister. Describing and reflecting on home, habitat, and environment, the poems traverse the boundaries of the surreal, mining the realms of historical and personal myth, to pose coherent questions.

€12,00

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In a Hare’s Eye

ISBN: 978-1-907682-36-0 | Pages: 80 | Published: 2015

Here are poems of wonder, imagination, grief, bewilderment and delight. Drawing on an awareness formed during a rural childhood, they record the natural world and the way we, as humans, live in it, leaving the marks of our passing on the landscape and on our personal stories and mythologies. While exploring our responsibilities to each other and to the earth, these poems cross and re-cross the permeable borders between Christian tradition and a post-Christian world, and between the real and the unconscious. These are lyrical poems that demonstrate a rigorous aesthetic and explore themes of memory, the natural world, a sense of place, the dreamscape and what it means to be a spiritual person in a post-Christian world.

€12,00

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Useful Links

Doire is the Irish word for oak grove, translating into English as Derry.

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