Wednesday 28th April was the last Wednesday of the month and so all the usual (and some unusual) suspects gathered together in Cassidy’s of Westmoreland Street for another very well attended 7 Towers Open Mic night. Always the brave young man, Andre Kapoor went first with his own unique rhyming poetry, delivered from the heart and without a script. Eileen Keane, Steve Conway, and Inez dillon followed on to complete the first part of the show. One of the attractive things about this open mic (and

quite apart from the quality of the contributions) is this division into four or five parts, with a few minutes in between, which allows some socialising and also (dare one say it) gives the brain cells a bit of rest from having to deal with so much poetry and heightened prose. I wish this understanding of the demands on the audience was more common at events like these. These breaks are arranged by the MC Declan McLoughlin, as is the order in which the writers appear. The overall effect, thanks to his work, is to make the evening move along at an even and ‘absorbable’ pace.

Other contributors were Michael Farren (from the Boyne Writers, whose piece on stamp-collecting [‘Philately’]struck a chord with this particular nerd now writing), Ross Hattaway, Ann Tannam, Orla Fay, Oran Ryan and Liz McSkeane, whose short story about Mozart’s dad was great. Philip Lynch, Helen Dempsey and Karl Parkinson also took the mic, and there are one or two others to whom I make the usual apology. Another great, and seriously unmissable, night.