Some Days the Bird, by Anne Casey and Heather Bourbeau, Beltway Editions 2022, was launched by Margaret O’Brien on 30 June 2023 at the Brewery Lane Theatre, Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary, Ireland

A warm Poetry Plus / Brewery Lane / Carrick-on-Suir welcome to everyone here this evening, our final Poetry Plus of this season. An especially deep welcome to our special guests, poets Anne Casey and Heather Bourbeau, who honour us here this evening with the Irish launch of their collaborative collection, Some Days the Bird. Allow me to introduce our two special guests:

Anne Casey is an Irish poet, a native of Miltown Malbay in Co. Clare who lives in Australia. She is the author of four poetry collections. A journalist, magazine editor, legal author and media communications director for 30 years, her work ranks in The Irish Times’ Most Read and her work is widely published and anthologised internationally. Anne has won literary prizes in Ireland, the UK, the USA, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia, most recently American Writers Review 2021 and the 2021 iWoman Global Award for Literature. A law graduate from UCD, she is the recipient of an Australian Government Scholarship for her PhD examining The Second-Wave Impact in Australia of the Great Irish Famine at the University of Technology Sydney.

Heather Bourbeau is an American writer whose creative work has appeared in many prestigious journals. Her work has been featured in several anthologies, including America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (Sixteen Rivers Press) and RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music (Michigan State University Press). She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia. Her latest collection, Monarch (Cornerstone Press, 2023), is a poetic memoir of overlooked histories from the American West where she was raised.

I invite you all to now cast your minds back to 2020. As we approached International Women’s Day, 8th March 2020, Covid began to take shape as a definite threat, a virus disdainful of borders and it would soon become clear that being an island nation would offer us in Ireland no real protection. Here in Carrick-on-Suir we finalised our preparations and rehearsals for a celebration of International Women’s Day with a performance on stage right here in Brewery Lane Theatre, directed by Linda Fahy of The Tudor Artisan Hub whose brainchild it was. This was to be the last such gathering before lockdown. I can clearly remember feeling jittery about being in close proximity to others that night; we had yet to wear masks and vaccination was away in the future, a future we had no capacity to imagine. On stage that night I read a poem by Anne Casey, with her gracious permission, Welcome To Your Life Cruise’s Self-Guided Tour, (with its prescient closing phrase, ‘we urge you to take every precaution as we navigate.’) As I read I could hear some audible sounds of a knowing recognition from the audience. That is the power of poetry. That is the power of an Anne Casey poem.

Meanwhile a few days later Anne was alighting from a plane in the US, to find the world had changed utterly during the fifteen hour flight from Australia. She had to run the gauntlet of events cancelled / changed and the anxiety about flying between cities in the US, plus the deeper anxiety and worry about being apart from family and of whether she would even be allowed back to Australia as borders were now closing around the world. So the pandemic years began.To welcome Anne and Heather here in 2023 for the Irish launch of their creative collaboration is a wonderful rounding of a circle.

The collection, Some Days the Bird, is the result of Anne and Heather’s pandemic collaboration across the globe. Anne and Heather wrote poems to each other weekly during 2021, the second year of the pandemic, to and from opposite hemispheres and seasons. When I say wrote, I mean handwritten, posted, by snail mail. These handwritten poetic missives have this week been lodged by Anne and Heather in the Special Collections Archive of University College Dublin.

Like so many of us here, Anne and Heather found in creative collaboration, despite the challenges of isolation and lockdowns, a means to navigate the strange new world. That we find the ways to such things should give us some hope against other challenges that surely lie ahead. The resulting collection with its wonderful title offers us something of Heaney’s redress of poetry, ‘a glimpsed alternative’.

Despite the chaos, anxiety and real horrors of the pandemic, Anne Casey & Heather Bourbeau have crafted a collection that is poised, harmonious and balanced, yet does not flinch from the deep personal, social and political impact of the pandemic and neither do they flinch from the sometimes creeping, oftentimes sudden chaos of climate change. There are lines by the late Michael Donaghy, from his poem ‘Machines’, that I believe are relevant to the achievement of this collection, Some Days the Bird:

‘… only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.’

To illustrate I would like to read excerpts of some poems from the collection. From the poem that gives the collection its title… ‘Some days you’re the seed, some days the bird’ (Anne Casey)

There are moments I’m consumed
by the jolt
of how our world has veered,
others bewitched by the hum
of wildness overcoming concrete.”

‘Perseverance’ (Heather Bourbeau)

The Mars rover has landed. But for now, I am terrestrial.
My hands needy and dirty. Pull weeds. Expose beetles.
Unearth worms, touch their pink and writhing bodies.

 When a headline is plucked from a newspaper, that ephemeral and disposable medium, and then placed as a poem title, it’s given added weight and a resonance that speaks volumes, for example; ‘The Minister for Bushfire Recovery is reassigned to Floods’ (Anne Casey)

‘Into the loam’ (Heather Bourbeau)

I steel myself for the coming language—
burnt and blistered, whipped and ravaged cocked and ready.
Grateful green leaves emerge from my near-bare tree,
hummingbirds still feast on my sage.

 ‘Kin’ (Heather Bourbeau)

I think of my Australian friend’s forced separation
……………………………………………from her Irish dad,
her husband’s losses of both parents during this pandemic.
These are the small silver threads tethering us—
empathy and gratitude.
A mother deer and her two fawns come
to eat my apples that drop to the dry, dry earth.

 Finally, these lines from ‘Season’s Greetings’ (Anne Casey)

I might talk of portents,
how we are stuck on repeat
as omicron cases double every two days,
our Health Minister warning of blistering records
to come—our ‘other’ home, family again on the wrong side
of a closed border, but for now, I have turned my gaze
to a rare break—blue sky spilling sunlight, branches thick
with shining green stars,

 I’ve already mentioned the notion of balance and moving and to conclude on that theme I share what Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift, has said; that if a work of art is to live, it must keep moving, and add from poet Marilyn Krysl, that ‘readers-receivers are crucial links through which the work of art keeps moving’. This collection will most certainly keep moving. Please prepare to receive Anne Casey and Heather Bourbeau as they read from their collection, Some Days the Bird.

An audio recording of the launch is available here:

 – Margaret O’Brien

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Margaret O’Brien co-founded The Story House Ireland (2014 – 2018) and formerly lectured in English and Creative Writing at Waterford Institute of Technology (now SETU). Her book, Weather Report: a 90-day journal for reflection and well-being, with the aid of the Beaufort Wind Scale was published in 2022. She is an affiliate of Amherst Writers & Artists and is the Ireland editor for the US based literary magazine, Trasna. She curates the annual Brewery Lane Writers’ W/E and the monthly open mic, Poetry Plus, in Brewery Lane Theatre, Carrick-on-Suir and runs her own workshops, Writing Changes Lives, both in person and online. Her work has been published by Arlen House, Southword, The South Circular, RTE/O’Brien Press, Flash Frontier, The Pickled Body, Fudoki, Hinterland, Beir Bua and The Irish Times among others. She was co-director of Poetry Ireland’s inaugural Poetry Town, Carrick-on-Suir, in September 2021 and, since 2017, has co-produced numerous cross-disciplinary arts projects in conjunction with The Tudor Artisan Hub arts collective. She welcomes contact through her website: http://www.margaretaobrien.com 

Some Days the Bird is available from https://www.beltwayeditions.com/new-releases/some-days-the-bird