The Orchard Keeper
Published on 23. June 2017
Book
Pamphlet
30 pages
978-1-84861-560-1 (ISBN)
Description
Francis Ledwidge was a frequent visitor to the McGoona household at Donaghmore, near Navan, Co. Meath. Matty McGoona, an amateur naturalist and musician, became his close friend. A chance encounter with an elderly man beside the orchard at Donaghmore was the catalyst which led Susan Connolly to explore the life of Francis Ledwidge in greater depth, and to write her sequence of poems, The Orchard Keeper. Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane, Co. Meath, in 1887. He wrote poetry from an early age. He enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in 1914, and survived the battlefields of Gallipoli, Serbia and Arras before being killed on July 31st, 1917, the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres. The six poems gathered under the title Woman in a Black Hat, warmly recall the lives of close friends and family.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Exeter
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 2 mm
Weight
53 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84861-560-1 (9781848615601)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Susan Connolly lives in Drogheda, Co. Louth. Her first full-length collection, For the Stranger, was published by Dedalus Press in 1993. She was awarded the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. In the same year she received a Publications Grant from the Heritage Council of Ireland for A Salmon in the Pool, a literary and place-names map of the River Boyne from source to sea. Collaborations with writer and photographer Anne-Marie Moroney include Race to the Sea (1999), Ogham: Ancestors Remembered in Stone (2000) and Winterlight (2002). With Anne-Marie Moroney she co-authored Stone and Tree Sheltering Water (1998), an exploration of sacred and secular wells in Co. Louth. Her poems have been published in journals and magazines throughout Ireland and the U.K. and are included in the Field DayAnthology, Vol IV, Voices and Poetry of Ireland and Windharp: Poems of Ireland since 1916. Some of her work has been broadcast on The Poetry Programme RTE Radio 1. Susan Connolly's second collection Forest Music was published by Shearsman Books in 2009. Shearsman also published her chapbook, The Sun-Artist: a book of pattern poems, in 2013. Bridge of the Ford, her collection of thirty-three visual poems, was published by Shearsman Books in 2016.