Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

The Shaking Bog is pleased to partner with Poetry Town in presenting one of Ireland’s most remarkable and influential poets, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Newly moved to County Wicklow, this is a rare opportunity to hear Nuala in this intimate poetry reading and conversation at Mermaid Arts.

Writing in the Irish of the Kerry Gaeltacht of her childhood on the Dingle peninsula, Nuala’s work has been translated into English by poets as diverse as Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Michael Longley.  Her passionate, searching engagement with language, myth and a sense of place is the hallmark of her profound, witty and moving writing.  As fellow poet and translator Lavina Greenlaw has remarked: “Ní Dhomhnaill can weave together comedy and darkness, confrontation with casual chat. Her poems can be reflective lyrics or sprawling narratives, incantatory or wisecracking.”

Reading in Irish and in English translation, Nuala’s readings are a joy to behold.  As she writes - in a translation by Paul Muldoon - in her poem The Language Issue:

I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant
in a basket of inter winded
iris leaves