"Poems from Port Cities" took place as a hybrid live session at Ó Bhéal's 10th annual Winter Warmer Festival on 26 November, 2022. It consisted of poetry readings and a thematically grounded, speculative roundtable conversation curated by Cornelia Gräbner and featuring the poets Matthew Geden, Mary Noonan, Greg Quiery and Eleanor Rees. The reading featured poems that were written from within the experience of inhabiting port cities and shorelines and envisioned these liminal places as portals between materialities, life forms, and ways of being on the world.
In the conversation, participants speculatively engaged and experimented with the invitation to engage with "port cities as liminal places of encounter, of fluidity, of transition. Sea and land meet there, as do all the living creatures that inhabit seas and rivers; consequently, human and non-human life intertwine in and around port cities as they do in few other places. At the same time, ports are also infrastructure spaces, where space is organized for the purpose of commerce and capitalist extraction. Therefore, port cities are also the location of confrontations and negotiations, of clashes of interests and convictions, of struggles over ethics and politics, over land, water and air."
The event was organisationally and technically supported by Paul Casey, Director of Ó Bhéal.
acknowledgement
We are grateful to the research project POEPOLIT II - Contemporary Poetry and Politics: Social Conflicts and Poetic Dialogisms, funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades del Goberno de España (PID2019-105709RB-I00, 2020-2023) for the support and funding of 'Poems in Port Cities' and for the support for this special issue, and to Ó Bhéal for hosting the event 'Poems from Port Cities' at the Winter Warmer Festival 2022.
» Matthew Geden was born and brought up in the English Midlands, moving to Kinsale, Co Cork, in 1990. His full-length collections are Swimming to Albania (Bradshaw Books, 2009), The Place Inside (Dedalus Press, 2012) and most recently The Cloud Architect (Doire Press, 2022). Other publications include Kinsale Poems (Lapwing, 2001), Fruit (Survision Books, 2020) and Ocean of Earth: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (SurVision Books, 2024). In November 2019 he was Writer in Residence at Nanjing Literature Centre, China and held the same position for Cork County Library and Arts Service from 2020-2023.
» Cornelia Gräbner is a Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Lancaster University. She received a PhD from the University of Amsterdam for a dissertation on the performance of poetry and political commitment. She has published on the poetry performance and resistance literature in Europe and the Americas, including the edited collection Performing Poetry: Body, Place and Rhythm in the Poetry Performance (with Arturo Casas) and co-edited special issues on "The Poetics of Resistance," "Poetry in Public Spaces," and most recently, a special issue of Critical Comparative Studies on "Against the Grain: Dissent, Opposition and La parola contraria in Literature, Politics and the Arts" (with Joost de Bloois and Jim Hicks).
» Mary Noonan taught French literature at University College Cork over a period of thirty years. Her first collection, The Fado House (Dedalus Press, 2012) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and the Strong/Shine Award. A limited edition pamphlet – Father – was published by Bonnefant Press (NL) in 2015. Her second collection, Stone Girl (Dedalus Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott International Poetry Prize in 2020. Dans un autre compartiment, a selection of her poems translated to French by poet Valérie Rouzeau, will be published by Apic Editions (Alger) in 2025.
» Greg Quiery is originally from County Down, Ireland, and has lived in Liverpool since the early 1970s. Since retiring from his position as a head teacher, he has written In Hardship And Hope (G and K, 2017), a detailed history of the Liverpool Irish. He has published two poetry collections, A Stray Dog Following (Stairwell Books, 2020) and Oglet (XXXX). The former observes and poeticizes everyday social relations and occurrences. The latter celebrates the wildlife on the edges of urban Liverpool and alerts us to the threat to this precious environment. His poems have featured in Talk and Tongue on Radio 4, on Radio Merseyside and in the Quality of Mersey anthology. They have been celebrated for the attentiveness to the poetic qualities of everyday speech, expression and place, for their musicality, and for the poet's principled and compassionate approach.
» Eleanor Rees lives on the Wirral peninsula on Merseyside, UK. She is a poet, senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool Hope University, has extensively worked as a poet in communities with The Windows Project, and regularly gives public readings at festivals and literary events. In her PhD thesis 'Making Connections: The Work of the Local Poet' (Exeter, 2014) she explored the relationship between the poet, place, and community. Her poetry collections include Portents and Portals: New and Selected Poems (Guillemot Press, 2024), Tam Lin of the Winter Park (Guillemot Press, 2022), The Well at Winter Solstice (Salt, 2019, Northern Writers Award 2018), Blood Child (Pavilion, 2015), Eliza and the Bear (Salt, 2009) and Andraste's Hair (Salt, 2007, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, UK, and the Irish Glen Dimplex New Writers' Award). A collection of essays Eyes in the Wood: Encounters with Poiesis (collected theoretical and lyric essays) is forthcoming from Broken Sleep, 2025. Her pamphlet collection Feeding Fire (Spout, 2001) received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002. Selections of Eleanor's poems have been translated and published in pamphlets and anthologies in French, Spanish, German, Lithuanian, Slovak and Romanian.
