Bridge of the Ford

Susan Connolly was born in Drogheda, Co. Louth, Ireland, in 1956. She studied Music and Italian at University College, Dublin. Her first full-length collection For the Stranger was published by the Dedalus Press in 1993. Other short collections include her sequence Boann in 'How High the Moon' (1991), 'Race to the Sea' (1999) and 'Winterlight' (2002). Collaborations with artist and photographer Anne-Marie Moroney include 'Race to the Sea', 'Ogham: Ancestors Remembered in Stone' (2000) and 'Winterlight'. With Anne-Marie Moroney she co-authored 'Stone and Tree Sheltering Water' (1998), an exploration of sacred and secular wells in Co. Louth. The publication of this book was sponsored by the Heritage Council of Ireland.Susan Connolly 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. She has received bursaries from the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annamakerrig.The poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has written: "Connolly in her work explores the significance of place through layers of time, resonating with history, folklore and archaeology."Several of her poems have been set to music by the composer Michael Holohan and have been performed in Ireland and abroad. A 40-minute programme about her poetry 'Touched by Winterlight' was broadcast on ABC National Radio (Australia) in 2005.

"This is a love letter to the poet's home territory: the Boyne Valley, its fabled and blooded river, the port of Drogheda and the mouth of the Boyne at Mornington and Baltray. Susan Connolly is a true original and like all true originals is intensely concerned with sources. These poems reach back to Kells, to Durrow, to Lindisfarne, to the holy books of those places, for the ground of their being. On the page, they negotiate visual spaces that can comfortably fit and ritualize the neolithic, contemporary hostage crises, Alexander Calder, the whammy pedal of a guitar. Symmetrical patternings that recall Persian carpets, traditional embroideries, and intricate folk handwork sit beside witty visual and verbal puns that recall '60s and '70s concrete poetry. Not the least of its many charms are the glimpses in this book of a fugitive Irish lyric poet flitting through the pages." -Paula Meehan