Joan McBreen

"Praise for The Watchful Heart"

The Watchful Heart

The Watchful Heart - A New Generation of Irish Poets - Poems and Essays

Publication - Spring 2009
First Reprinted - June 2010
The Watchful heart is an anthology of the work of twenty-four Irish poets born in the last fifty years. It contains biographical and bibliographical details of each contributor, together with photographs. All poets included have published at least two collections of poetry. Poetry in Irish with translations is also included. None of the poetry in this anthology has previously been published in collection form and with a few exceptions, the essays have not been published before. This anthology has been compiled and edited by poet Joan McBreen, whose previous anthology The White Page - An Bhileog Bhán: Twentieth-Century Irish Women Poets (Salmon Poetry 1999) is now in its third reprint.
Read Gerald Dawe's introduction at the launch night here.

Endorsements

For those of us who are avid readers and teachers of Irish poetry at some distance from Ireland, TheWatchful Heart is an invaluable aid to our search for rich new talent to share with students, invite to readings, and add to courses. The unique introductory format of photograph, biography, published collections, new poems and prose statement by each poet greatly facilitates personal discovery and the desire to read more; the anthology is a welcome and essential complement to The White Page / An Bhileog Bhán: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets.
Professor Ronald Schuchard
Emory University, Atlanta.

There is a sense in The Watchful Heart of a particular moment being recorded. What Joan McBreen has achieved in this anthology is to capture the fleeting transitory nature of the past twenty years or so in Ireland; a time of flux and change. I hope the public buy lots of copies of Joan McBreen's anthology. For 'The Girl Upstairs' by Leontia Flynn, for a start, or for John O Donnell's 'A Wedding Guest' but also because in so doing all twenty-four poets in The Watchful Heart will have contributed towards the healing work of Cancer Care West at University College Hospital, Galway.
Gerald Dawe
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin.

By assembling twenty-four poets of the post-Heaney, Mahon, Ní Chuilleaná in, Durcan, Muldoon et al. generation The Watchful Heart composes a profile of the ongoing state of Irish poetry. Biographically and bibliographically useful, the anthology is especially illuminating for the variety of its lyric and narrative voices (in Irish and English), as well as for the exuberant vitality of its poets' personal essays, that between them reveal poetry as "the rapt register of the world." Full of poetic thinking at work and at play, the collection richly illustrates the range, humour, and creative health of this new, by now mature, generation of Irish poets.
Eamon Grennan
Poet and Critic

This is an important and valuable anthology solely as a judicious selection of recent work by established younger Irish poets. The short essays the writers include on their motivations and methods, and on the current functions and place of poetry, make it indispensible. Joan McBreen's deft compilation offers a rich and provocative snapshot of what she calls the emerging "conversation" in the "long and often vexed tradition" of Irish poetry.
James Pethica
Director, TheYeats Summer School, Sligo and Williams College MA.

This anthology of poets, the majority of them born in the Sixties and several of whom are already seasoned voices, provides a showcase of the broad range and diversity of talents to have emerged from that generation – one that, on the evidence here, has kept faith unreservedly in the lasting power of the traditional lyric form. Each accompanying essay or commentary adds to what the poems tell us about the aesthetic of individual poets in ways that are both illuminating and rewarding for the reader. The Watchful Heart is ample testimony to the craft and imagination of this "new generation" and, importantly, it demonstrates how that generation has contributed to yet another season of renewal in Irish poetry.
Gerard Smyth
Poet and Managing Editor, The IrishTimes.


Heather Island

Heather Island Through their simple, plain-spoken respect for the ordinary forces of the landscape she loves - for its fauna and flora, its "season of stillness," its "late blackberries ruined by rain", or its "disconsolate cry of the lost" - the poems in Joan McBreen's quietly lyrical third collection compose a settlement for the heart, even a site for soul-pondering.

In brief elegies and celebrations her poems address losses, local phenomena, familial transitions, fashioning language-moments of subdued rapture (bird wings "the colour of opals") or sharply accented nostalgia (living away from Ireland, she insists that "one seashell to hold close/ to my ear would do,/ and rain on my face").

"I sing my own song," she says in one poem, and in the best of these poems her notes ring sweet and clear, so even winter clouds can "break, letting in such light."
Review by Eamon Grennan, 2009.

In this, her fourth collection, Joan McBreen interrogates loss and completes a tentative journey of renewal. A quiet strength sustains the consistently elegiac mood of "Heather Island". This poet of autumn and diminishing light revisits the shapes and colours of Tully lake and mountain in Connemara, the 'browning bracken' and 'the late blackberries'. But McBreen also travels far beyond the comfort of the familiar, to South America, to Borges and Neruda, to the mysteries of passing time and death. There is a serenity and sense of liberation, in her poems of acceptance, of 'souls set free/wheeling in the wind/unhurried/in a vast sky/beyond sound'.
Review by Geraldine Mitchell, 2009.
Read Gabriels Fitzmaurice's introduction at the launch night here

The Long Light on the Land (CD)

The Long Light on the Land The Long Light on the Land is a selection of Joan McBreen's poetry read to a background of traditional Irish airs and classical music on CD.

It was launched at the 45th Yeats International Summer School in Sligo on Thursday, August 5th, 2004 by Professor Bernard O'Donoghue.

"It is unusual for a poet´s spoken voice to match perfectly the voice and temper of their poems. But Joan McBreen´s compact disc is a delight from start to finish because the warmth of her voice and the evocative poetry of place that she delights in are perfectly attuned to the musical settings". Bernard O'Donoghue read more...
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