POETRY

Commitment to Writing

Attracta Fahy completed her MA in Writing at NUIG in 2017, and afterwards participated in Over The Edge poetry workshops, which she has continued for five years, and so far has completed fourteen terms. She attends Cúirt readings, and writing workshops every year. She has organised and attended classes with visiting poets, has participated in other poetry classes, including online master classes with Mary O’Donnell and Mark Roper, AnneMarie Curraín, Sean Hewitt, taken master classes in the UK with both Ginko, and Arvon, and an Advanced Master Class with John McCullough through the Creative Writing Programme UK.

 

Attracta supports and attends poetry readings and writing events in Galway, Co. Galway, and neighbouring counties. She attends launches, and has participated in several local cultural events, including events organised for Poetry Day, distributing poems to shops for display in local towns, and participating in musical and poetry gatherings in Headford, Tuam and Athenry.

 

She has also participated in events in other counties, including Mountshannon Arts Festival, and a has been to Belfast twice to read her work. She has given readings in several writing groups whenever asked, including Dundalk Writing, Speak Easy Cork, in Philadelphia, Toronto, Switzerland, and England.

INTERESTS

Attracta Fahy grew up on a farm in the west of Ireland, in the parish of Killererin, Co. Galway. Having a close affinity with her surroundings she is inspired by her sourroundings, the North East Galway landscape, and how contemplation of nature reflects, and resonates in humanity. The focus of her poetry is to explore, understand, and reveal these connections to nature, often through the use of folklore and myth.

 

Her aim is to support consciousness in our relationship between our inner and outer world, how we relate to each other, and to nature, so as to integrate a deeper understanding and empathy for our world and each other.

 

Attracta Fahy’s background was in Nursing, specialising as a Hospice Nurse, and five years later training in Social Care. She currently works as a Psychotherapist, and Supervisor in Psychotherapy, and also a Trainer. She is a mother of three children.

PUBLICATIONS

She was the Winner in Trócaire Poetry Ireland Poetry Competition 2021, and the October winner in Irish Times; New Irish Writing 2019.

 

Shortlisted for the Fish International Poetry Competition 2022, Pushcart nomination for Orbis Poetry Magazine 2022, and shortlisted for Saolta Poems for Patience Poetry Competition 2023.

 

 

Attracta’s poems have been published in Banshee, Poetry Ireland Review, Stinging Fly, Crannóg, Stony Thursday, Irish Times, Drawn To The Light Press, Cormorant, Crossways, Abridged, Live Encounters, Vox Populi, Rare Swan Press, Silver Birch Press, A New Ulster, Coast to Coast to Coast, Boyne Berries, Burning House Press, FourxFour, Enthralled, The Elixir, Bangor Literary Journal, Poethead, The Curlew, Orbis, North West Words, Honest Ulsterman, Wales Haiku Journal, Dreich, Tír Na nÓg, The Lake, Beir Bua, Dear Reader, 100 Words of Solitude, Vox Galvia Galway Advertiser, Sequoyah Cherokee, The Blue Nib, Psychotherapy magazine Inside Out, National Heritage Ireland Website August ’20, DCU Archives, Bold & Italic, Ink Sweat and Tears, Pickaroon, and in many other journals and magazines at home and abroad.

 

 

Attracta has been nominated three times for a Pushcart prize, included in Anthologies; Fearless, Civic Leicester, Poetry and Settled Status for All, Arlen House ‘Women Washing Windows 11,’ and Washing Windows 111, Impspired, 100 Words of Solitude, Best of American Inner Child Anthology 2018, The Blue Nib, Avalanche, ‘Of Mouth,’ Northern Women’s Writings, and The Heron Clan.

 

 

She has been nominated for Best of the Web 2019, shortlisted for 2018 Over The Edge New Writer of The Year, and long listed for 2019. She has been shortlisted for Allingham Poetry Prize in both 2019 and 2020. Featured in Mountshannon Arts festival 2021, National Heritage Site 2021.

 

She was a featured reader at the January Over The Edge Open Reading in Galway City Library 2020, also with American/Irish project Cultivating Voices. She was Guest Poet with the Bard School in 2019, and read with Paul Muldoon and Adrian Rice on New Mexico Irish Poets Salon Irish American Writers and Artists in February ’21.

 

Fly on the Wall Poetry Press published her debut chapbook Dinner in the Fields in March’20 just before lockdown. It was the publishers’ bestseller for 2020. It was also chosen by Poet Kevin Higgins as one of the best poetry books of 2020 for The Morning Star Newspaper.

 

Attracta was one of ten emerging poets chosen for the first-ever Dedalus Press Mentoring Programme in May/June 2021.Her poetry was chosen for discussion in the Friday Critique of Rattle Magazine in Los Angeles US, in December ’21.

 

She also writes Non-Fiction and Essays. Along with having an article relating to her profession published in the Galway Advertiser in 2020, she had a memoir piece included in The Working Class Anthology of Irish Stories “From The Plough to the Stars” in November 2020. Her essay “The Relic” was shortlisted in the 2021 Write By the Sea writing competition.

 

She received an Agility Award from the Arts Council in 2022, and is presently working towards publishing a full collection.

BACKGROUND

Attracta Fahy grew up on a farm in the west of Ireland, in the parish of Killererin, Co. Galway. Having a close affinity with her surroundings she is inspired by her sourroundings, the North East Galway landscape, and how contemplation of nature reflects, and resonates in humanity. The focus of her poetry is to explore, understand, and reveal these connections to nature, often through the use of folklore and myth.

 

Her aim is to support consciousness in our relationship between our inner and outer world, how we relate to each other, and to nature, so as to integrate a deeper understanding and empathy for our world and each other.

 

Attracta Fahy’s background was in Nursing, specialising as a Hospice Nurse, and five years later training in Social Care. She currently works as a Psychotherapist, and Supervisor in Psychotherapy, and also a Trainer. She is a mother of three children.

Endorsements

On Dinner in the Fields: In absorbing a new collection of poems, the nature and sensibility of the poet sometimes shines through like unexpected sunshine. Attracta Fahy is seer and chronicler, not of history as we’ve been taught it, but of a past speckled with folk memory; she is a seer into hearts, into the sensuous rush that sometimes defines what being human means. The world of nature—with foxes, swans, and emblematic creatures—moves her as much as the world of injustice, in which women can be diminished by home and society. This is sensitive, reflective work, rooted in a vision that is both beautiful and existential.
Mary O’Donnell, Maynooth, May 2019.
Poet
It is with great pleasure that I endorse the poetry of Attracta Fahy. Hers is the true poetry of the soul. From the depths of her intuitive self her poems speak to us of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Whether we read them in solitude or hear them spoken they give us a sense of our connectedness to the universe, to nature, and to each other.
Máirín Ní Nualláin
Psychiatrist and Analytical Psychologist.
“Attracta Fahy’s poetry is loaded with explosive material and hits the reader like a tornado. Her poems are rich with perfectly chosen images which couldn’t but move the reader. Indeed, if these emotionally raw poems don’t make you sit up and listen you should perhaps go to doctor to check if you’re still alive.”
Kevin Higgins
Poet
Appearing in journals for some time, Attracta Fahy’s poems now find their home in Dinner in the Fields. Like the ancients, she bears an attraction for the depths and modes of spirit, our humanity among the deceased, in lyrics of moving recollection. Here we find the strict codes of rural life, turf fires, gravestone etchings, the character of fields, the maw of slurry pits, the waves of migratory birds whose rhythms map our own instincts of homing and displacement. None of this dissolves in the treacle of nostalgia. Indeed, throughout she turns to address perils of our collective present: the sham of orthodoxy, the threats to intimacy, the border dividing possession and belonging, and the psyche’s slender dominion. But in the grip of these complex and often conflicting subjects, her premises join hands with her intimations: the hope that love is never far, that death cannot cancel meaning, which is always at hand, that family is continuous with history’s etchings, that the self grows concurrently in nature and family. As she writes, “hope/ moves in the soil beneath/ my feet.” If soil does anything of the sort, we are lucky indeed, and fortunate to have a poet of Fahy’s evocative talent to offer the beauty of it to mind. Further, it’s work that should be taken to memory.
David Rigsbee
Poet
Attracta Fahy’s Poetry Reading at the 2019 Bard Summer School: Attracta was the invited poet to this year’s Bard Summer School on Clare Island. The poets reading is always the valued start to the Feasta, the evening feasting and general merriment. This year’s reading was a huge success. Attracta has a very autobiographical style to her poetry. She took us first into her childhood and the two graveyards she lived between. Her poems picked up the everyday stuff and everyday rituals that were all around her. Somehow this “stuff” was always rich in meaning. Somehow also the rather morbid setting belied the feelings we were left with as the poems shared the formative symbols and doings of a young life. And like a good Celt, the dark preceded the light! Moving on, her subsequent poems became an unusual mix of the very normal and the very abnormal. The simple ‘playing house’ mixed with extraordinary insight into the world of an anorexia patient. Whether normal or abnormal, the poems offered rich material on which to reflect. The work offered some guidance without ever drifting into a didactic space. As a listener, I am left with a number of abiding images. There was a delicate gentleness in the tone and the content of the reading. Yet this is one strong lady and one strong poet with a strength carved from the journey. She finished in the important domain of longing and where we go once our basic needs are met. We were left with an empty space to fill with our imagination. But most poignantly was her frequent recourse to those times when we are in “the didn’t know” ….. space is when the damned thing we love is gone, or dead. And by then it’s too late! All in all, a great half hour was had by all. The prolonged clapping said it all!
Sandy Dunlop
Bard Mythologies

DREAMING THE MYTH ON

AFTER C.P. CAVAFY

Galway-Hookers-Ireland

When you sail into the harbor of Ithaca today,
you pass a small island with a sign on it that reads:
Every traveller is a citizen of Ithaca.

 

Don’t waste strength before the sea of fear surges
within, as you set out on this journey.

 

Storms will overwhelm, don’t let them steer.
Trust the winds will carry you onto new shores,
don’t decide where that shore should be.
Athena will be with you, and if need be
she will hold back time for your safe passing.

 

For now, pull up a chair, let despair sit at your table
too, feed it enough to nourish, take its insight,
but do not give it your whole self –

 

hold with others seated around your counter.
Listen with every ear; each voice from within
has something to offer.
You, your own teacher- will know.

 

Drink slowly whatever spirit you choose,
embrace the wisdom of your ancestors
they live in you, they too navigated depths.

 

Give time to silence; reflect. In high seas
the direction of wind and wave prevails,
so contemplate steps, and do not be troubled
if asked more than you feel you can give,
You will not be abandoned.

 

Hide your true self to protect from fools,
and don’t be fooled,
beware of the living dead.
Take heed; this is the hero’s journey,

 

you will return, not to what you knew,
but the home you longed for, one within you.

By Attracta Fahy.

submenu

READING
VIDEO PLATFORMS
GALLERY
BOOKS FOR SALE
WRITING COURSES
CREATIVE WRITING