Two readers for the poetry seesion today at 1.15 pm at Chapters Bookshop. First off: Celeste Auge’ who remarked on the effect on her poetry of being something of an outsider, her father being Canadian and her mother Irish. She read a poem called ‘Lost’ which featured this theme. But then she gave a poem about Galway, touching on the different changes a city goes through and yes I did wonder myself where all those wine-drinkers and homeless went while Eyre Square was being dug up. And are they back now? These poems and several more from her collection ‘The Essential Guide to Flight’ were well worth the trip into town from Lucan. More about Celeste at http://sites.google.com/site/celesteauge/

Orla Martin followed with a selection which included ‘The Rising’, something of a study of the ‘organised chaos’ of sharing a bedroom at home with a sbling who is… em… rather untidy. Celeste had spoken of the importance of  ‘relationships’ in her poetry and so too with Orla in a piece called ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and also in her last one (today) called ‘Phobic’.  I liked particularly the one about her work-day life called ‘For a Living’ which had a line in it somewhere about Baggot Street that reminded me of Eliot’s one about the crowds going over London Bridge (‘so many’): her poem caught the same humdrum weariness, I thought.