Michael Healy (Poems) and Pat Cowley (Paintings)
This poetry collection includes Samhain, Glentogher, Snow on Glenshane, A Rushy Field, Gable and others awarded the 2005 Charles Macklin Autumn School poetry collection prize. However, this is not just a collection of poetry. Pat Cowley’s paintings find their visual inspiration in the same geographical territory that shapes Michael Healy’s poems. This is a collaboration, a coming together, based on shared sensibilities, of poetry and painting that has at its core an affinity with the place in which both men set their work.
As with the best of such collaborations, the poems and the paintings illuminate each other; they force us to look closely and read carefully. The resonances are worth the effort.
A worthy winner of the 16th Charles Macklin Poetry Prize, Michael Healy’s poems are grounded in their sense of place, a poetry that gives answer to a local landscape while remaining open to the wider world. Paul Grattan, poet
