NATIONAL POETRY DAY with LIVE Network

For National Poetry Day 2023 LIVE Network has partnered with Dedalus Press and Bloodaxe Books UK, to present poetry from two amazing poets, who have short readings of their work featured today on the LIVE NETWORK YouTube Channel, which can be viewed below.

A number of copies of The Golden Thread by Amali Gunasekera and Flirting With Tigers from Amy Abdullah Barry are being distributed in communities across the six counties of the Network today.

Enjoy the reading!

Flirting with Tigers is the debut collection of poems from Malaysian-born Amy Abdullah Barry, a poet based in Athlone, Ireland, published by Dedalus Press.

Amy Abdullah Barry, originally from Penang, Malaysia, now lives in Athlone. She is published widely in journals and magazines and featured in Breaking Ground Ireland. Her poems have been translated into many languages and she has been awarded Literature bursaries from The Arts Council and Words Ireland. Chosen for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series in 2022, she has performed her work in Ireland and internationally.

“A distinctive new voice in Irish poetry, Amy Abdullah Barry evokes people and place in rich sensuous detail, exploring mystery and danger alongside love and loss.Her debut collection travels from the rain forests of her childhood home in Malaysia to the banks of the Suck in the Irish midlands with zestful poems of warmth, insight and surprise. “

— Jane Clarke

Amali Gunasekera was born and grew up in Sri Lanka. She works in the field of Archetypal Psychology. After living in Mozambique, Kenya and India, she is now based in Cumbria. Her first collection, Lotus Gatherers, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016 and Amali was selected for the Arts Council England’s project Breaking Ground: Celebrating the Best British Writers of Colour in 2017. Her second collection, The Golden Thread, is also published by Bloodaxe.

Blending the sacred and the everyday, Amali Gunasekera’s second collection The Golden Thread is a search for grace through the deep process of transmuting emotional trauma into peace. She takes up Muriel Rukeyser’s famous line: ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.’ Her book’s central sequence, Nine [Miscarried] Methods, considers the challenge of asserting a woman’s equal status within a patriarchal objectified culture.

‘This collection holds so much of what it means to be human in the world, to find our own ways to feel within the collective, both as an animal and as a part of nature… The Golden Thread is so wholly, so beautifully realized that it’s the perfect prelude to summer’s beginning.’ – Angela María Spring, Washington Independent Review of Books (On Poetry: June 2022)2022.