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Agenda Poetry Competition Results

First Prize: Kim Lasky, ‘The Bed that is a Tree’

Second Prize: Sharon Black, ‘Palomas’

Third Prize: Claudia Jessop, ‘Marionette Dream’

Runners-up:

Abegail Morley, ‘Wasps’

Judith Taylor, ‘Afterlife’

Will Johnson, ‘a devotion’

Anna Wigley, ‘Dear John’

Jane Lovell, ‘The Prayer of St. Simon’

Patricia McCarthy, editor of Agenda, is featured (with twelve poems) in the online

World Poetry Portfolio No 50, edited by Sudeep Sen

The Irish poet, Greg Delanty, whose collected poems came out from Carcanet recently, has visited the Editor several times, and a section of an issue in 2008 to mark his fiftieth birthday will focus on his poetry.

Peter Robinson, well-known contributor to Agenda with poetry and essays, has now moved from Japan where he lived for eighteen years to Reading. He has taken up a challenging post at the university there.

Conor Fallon’s ‘Pegasus’ was on the front cover of the above issue, 1996. His ‘Nun with Singing Bird’ was on the back cover of the same issue:

Conor Fallon, son of the poet Padraic Fallon (whose Collected Poems were published by Carcanet) offered a steel sculpture of his Pegasus for the front cover of the Irish issue of Agenda, Vol. 33 Nos. 3-4 in 1996, guest-edited by Patricia McCarthy, and his ‘Nun with the Singing Bird’ for the back cover.

He was one of the most important Irish sculptors of the last century, renowned for his steel birds, horses, hares and fish (all part of the Celtic tradition) which have a spare, sleek beauty and presence with their clean lines. He was influenced not only by Cubism which he considered ‘the development in the art of the 20th century’, by Brancusi and Picasso’s three-dimensional work, but also by the early Greek sculptures and the carved figures of Ancient Egypt. From Modernism, he looked to Naum Gabo (a resident of St. Ives, Cornwall where Conor and his artist wife Nancy lived for a while, before moving to Kinsale, Cork for some years and then to Ballinaclash, County Wicklow) who demonstrated the avoidance of mass in sculptural space.

Although he was initially known for fairly small sculptures when he remarked ‘I was unable to see how I could do public sculptures of birds without them being distortions’, he eventually became noted for his monumental steel sculptures, mainly commissioned for important public places such as Enniscorthy Bridge, County Wexford, University College, Cork, and in Dublin, St. Patrick’s hospital, the Bank of Ireland Centre, University College, and a landmark piece for Independent Newspapers. He was awarded the Oireachtas gold medal for sculpture in 1980, and devoted much time to his role as secretary of the Royal Hibernian Academy and board member of the National Gallery of Ireland.

Grey Gowrie’s Domino Hymn, Poems from Harefield (Agenda Editions/Greville Press £10) was well reviewed in the Independent by Peter Forbes. (Available from The Wheelwrights, Fletching Street, Mayfield, East Sussex TN20 6TL)

In November, 2006 the Editor of Agenda, Patricia McCarthy and Marcus Frederick, Administration Manager went to Florence, Italy where there was a German, American and Italian conference on Dante, with talks in Dante’s old house.

There the Editor met Robert Pinski, a famous authority on Dante, and a past contributor to Agenda, who promises to contribute more work in the future.