Saturday, February 14, 2015

Performance Poetry

This evening I introduced the poet, Aoife Mannix, as the closing act of a two-day Eng Lang Teaching fair. I don't read much poetry but I very much like Aoife's work. 
I'd worked with her once before, in Bangkok eight years ago. She'd just published Growing Up An Alien, about her itinerant childhood in Dublin, Ottawa, New York and London. Tonight she read from that and a later compilation, Turn the Clocks Upside Down. I say 'read' but actually she doesn't. She stands centre stage and performs, like an actor from memory. Her poems are beautiful, funny and touching, about normal everyday things: family, loss, longing, life. Here are five of them from five years ago. Oddly she's holding a book but she never once looks at it. Lovely stuff.

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