We are delighted to open this year’s festival with a celebration of the landmark anthology Queering the Green. This anthology brings together 31 of the most distinctive queer Irish poets to emerge since 2000, representing the multiplicity and vibrancy of the queer experience in 21st Century Ireland. The poems in this anthology address the exclusions of the past, speak to the diversity of the present, and point towards the radical possibilities of the future.
Editor Paul Maddern will be hosting three poets from the anthology, Colette Bryce, Toby Buckley, and Sarah Clancy, who will read a selection of their work.
Toby Buckley is an archivist and writer from Donegal, currently based in Belfast. He completed his MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast as the first recipient of the Ruth West Poetry Award Scholarship. His work has appeared in numerous literary publications including Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly and Channel Magazine. His work features in the Doire Press anthology, Empty House (2021) and The Lifeboat Press anthology, Queering the Green (2021). His first pamphlet, Milk Snake, was published by Emma Press in 2022.
Sarah Clancy is a poet, activist and community worker from Galway city although she now lives and works in County Clare. She has published three collections of poetry Stacey and the Mechanical Bull (Lapwing Belfast), Thanks for Nothing Hippies (Salmon Poetry) and The Truth and Other Stories (Salmon Poetry). Her poems have been published in Ireland the UK, USA, Canada, Mexico, Slovenia, Poland, Italy and Nicaragua and broadcast on RTE TV and Radio and BBC Radio. More recently her work was included in the groundbreaking anthology from The Lifeboat Press Queering the Green and in a film–poem collaboration between filmmaker Matthew Thompson, IMMA, Poetry Ireland and the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation.
Colette Bryce has published five collections with Picador, including The Full Indian Rope Trick (2004) and Self-Portrait in the Dark (2008). The Whole & Rain-domed Universe (2014), which draws on her experience of growing up in Derry during the Troubles, received a Ewart-Biggs Award in memory of Seamus Heaney. Selected Poems (2017) won the Pigott Prize for Irish Poetry. Her latest collection is The M Pages (2020). She is also a poetry editor: previously of the journals Poetry London and Poetry Ireland Review, and currently at Picador.
