Launch: Poems for Patience

Due to Covid-19 this event will now take place at the House Hotel.

Poems for Patience is a long running series which over the past eighteen years has featured poems by leading Irish and international poets such as Seamus Heaney, Philip Schultz, Jane Hirschfield, Michael Longley, Naomi Shihab Nye, Vona Groarke, Tess Gallagher and many more. This year Poems for Patience will be selected and introduced by Moya Cannon.

The poems, after exhibition on the Arts Corridor in University Hospital Galway, are then displayed in waiting areas throughout Galway University Hospitals and in 2022 will also be distributed to our public hospitals in Ballinasloe, Castlebar, Roscommon, Sligo and Letterkenny. 

Saolta Arts is hopeful that the poetry displayed throughout the hospitals will give people pause for reflection and space for hope in both those joyful celebratory moments as well as the all too often times of pain or worry. In recent years Saolta Arts has also run a poetry competition. The winning poem from the 2022 competition will be included in the Poems for Patience Poetry Collection and the winner will be invited to read their poem at this launch. Introduced by competition judge: poet Kevin Higgins.

Moya Cannon is an Irish poet with six published collections, including her recent Collected Poems published by Carcanet in 2021. She has received the Brendan Behan Award and the O’Shaughnessy Award and was 2011 Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University.