Poetry Reading: Mary O’Malley, Liam Carson, Paul Perry

Mick Lally Theatre

Mick Lally Theatre, Ireland

Join us for an afternoon of poetry with Mary O’Malley, Liam Carson and Paul Perry. Mary O’Malley’s The Shark Nursery won the Walcott Prize in 2025. This collection explores a world shaped by lockdowns, online realities, and the animal kingdom. Drawing on Irish myth and contemporary concerns, the poems blur the lines between human, animal, and metaphysical realms, using language to confront modern perils. The collection also fuses mythic with modern elements, as in the eerie, online-driven world of 'The Ballad of Googletown.' We welcome Mary’s return to Cúirt after a long-term involvement with the festival. Liam Carson’s Belfast Twilight is a collection of haikai that create kaleidoscopic montages, taking the reader into various worlds. From Belfast's Docklands at twilight to windswept islands off the west of Ireland, to life in 1980s London squats or even the suburban haven of the People's Park in Dun Laoghaire. Paul Perry's Clockhammer is a captivating work obsessed with time, not merely its passage, but its pressures, distortions, absences, and residues. Paul treats chronology as unreliable narration, where memory and its ghosts step forward not as testimony but as presence.