Remarks made by Gaelic poet, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, at an Errigal Arts Event in his house in Donegal, Ireland, welcoming fellow poet Kate Newman on 24^th July, 2025

With her first collection, The Blind Woman in the Blue House (Summer Palace Press 2001), Kate Newmann made her presence felt in Irish poetry. Since then she is a commanding voice, a poet who writes about the tumults of the human heart with a frankness and a tenderness that I value. She has a persuasive trust in what Wordsworth called “the essential passions of the heart”.

Her poetry is elegiac, meditative and grave. She is also gifted with the mystic’s intuitive insights. Her series of long poems in I Am A Horse (Arlen House 2011), attests to this rare flair and power. With stylistic assurance and a wildly inventive stance, she invokes famous personalities from the past: Tom Crean; Oscar Wilde; Jim Morrison; Vaslav Nijinsky; Pyotr Tchaikovsky; Amadeo Modigliani and Isadora Duncan.

Though they are all immured in the eternal, she conjures them in her poems with a breath-taking sentience. These poems are visionary meditations, meeting-places where the world of the past communes with the present, like her deft, spirited handling of the death-bed scene of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey who died on 10^th November 1938 in Dolmabahce Palace, Istanbul:                           

 …
as he lay, secular and holy,

his pores stale with sweating out
Ottoman, sweating Sultanate, sweating
Caliphate and Sharia Courts, all that he’d abolished.

He sensed religion lurking
waiting to tear up the votes of women,
pull its darkness over the mouth of change.

…
Even the dervishes he secularised
and now, whirling towards the future
(he was only fifty-seven)

he could not modernise,
he could not outlaw
the dogma of death.

……………………………. – from ‘Ataturk’, Ask Me Next Saturday (Summer Palace Press 2018)

Poetry, when it embodies its true calling, is a quest for meaning, for truth. It is, therefore, part of the wider struggle for freedom, for dignity, for humanness.

Kate Newmann writes with a compelling voice, and a weighty one at that, about the tragic destinies and the unsettling horrors of our times. Grim, her 2015 volume, published by Arlen House, is a powerful book about the Holocaust; a profound realisation of suffering, unequalled, I believe, in Irish poetry. To read these poems is to taste sorrow at its very core.

Keats tells us that the truest poetry will be written by those to whom the miseries of the world are indeed miseries and will not let them rest. Kate Newmann’s words are bells of alarm that keep us awake in a languid, indifferent world.

Having extolled the virtues of poetry, its determination to hold good against oppression and to stand up for what is just and right, I cannot in all sincerity stand at this lectern and not mention what is happening in Gaza.

I know that all of you here tonight are outraged by the appalling plight of these abandoned people. The Israeli Armed Forces are inflicting another Nakba on the Palestinians.

I will not hesitate to use a word like ethnic cleansing. I will not hum and haw about calling it extermination. In short, I will not shrink from saying that it is genocide. However much we have the arrogant rants of denial from Israeli elected representatives or the haughty composure of army spokespeople justifying their war in Gaza, we know the horrible truth of what is happening. Every day we see it on our screens, the sickening images of starving children. We see it and it is unbelievable; the forsaken faces of Gaza, the ruinous crush of their livelihoods, the effacement of their culture, the incarcerated horror of their lives. We cannot be duped by Israeli disinformation that wants us to believe that no enforced starvation is taking place in Gaza. We see it in the skeletal bodies of babies; in the gaunt faces of milkless mothers; in the haggard looks of helpless fathers. We are seeing a wasting away of life that is truly criminal.

And what can we do when the most dominant and influential governments in the world, the powers-that-be, are indifferent to the daily atrocities in Gaza, and indeed, are complicit in them by supplying Israel with a murderous stockpile of weaponry.

Gaza is a hell-hole of suffering; bombed, blasted and smashed to smithereens. The Zionist regime in Israel has managed (at least up to now) to hold together a cosy confederacy of abettors and backers who support and uphold their abhorrent behaviour towards the Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, where the expansion of unlawful Jewish settlements and the expulsion of the native population is increasing all the time.

What can we do as a civil society and an arts community but raise our voices and proclaim the truth of what is happening? A three-line poem by Nina Cassian, a Romanian poet, comes to mind: 

 I am nothing more
than a stain of blood
that speaks.

As for myself, this bloody carnage in Gaza makes of this heart a grieving Palestine:

Ó Ghaza go Mín a’ Leá
fadliñe péine,
fadliñe fola.

 

From Gaza to Mín a’ Leá
a meridian of pain,
a meridian of blood.

Like Kate Newmann, I’m doubtful whether or not a “fit metre” or a “worthy metaphor” can describe the unfathomable horror of Auschwitz or Gaza. But to remain silent is a moral failure and a crime.

Please welcome Kate Newmann, a poet whose perspective is always a humanising one as she charts these unsettling times that we live in.

Kate Newmann: 3 Poems

 – Cathal Ó Searcaigh

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Cathal Ó Searcaigh is a leading Irish language poet, Irish being his first language. Since the 1970s he has published plays, novels, memoir and travelogues, but it is in his many books of  poetry that he has been lauded for his “confident internationalism”, and for broadening the horizons of what it means to be an Irish poet writing in the native language. He has been widely translated and anthologized, and his collected poems will be launched in late 2025.

Kate Newmann is an Irish poet. She read at the 25^th Medellin International Poetry Festival, Colombia, and at the Himalayan Echoes Festival in Nainital, India. She has been involved in many projects, including creative writing with student teachers at a summer camp in Vyborg, Russia, and with the Chickasaw Nation, Oklahoma, USA.  She has published five collections of poetry.

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