Brian Kirk's Blog

Every year I do up a list of achievements in terms of publications and awards received during the year and this year is no different. Also this year I did some really enjoyable readings – Over The Edge in Galway during the summer, Canalaphonic in Rathmines Library in May with some of my fellow Hibernian poets and others, and Staccato in Toner’s in November, which is a great new literary and musical night out launched this year by those talented pair, Tanya Farrelly and David Butler.

The highlight for me this year was publishing The Rising Son which I hope will continue to sell well during 2016. I’ve had huge support since the book came out and I hope to do some readings further afield in 2016 and visit some schools also to talk a little about the history and the book itself and why I wrote it etc. So plenty to look forward to there.

I am also pleased to say that work on my first poetry collection is now complete! It just remains for me to try and get it published this year. Getting highly commended in the Patrick Kavanagh Award again this year was a great boost, as was winning the Bailieborough Poetry Prize. My poetry group The Hibernians continues to push me to create better and better work and the publication of our anthology The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work was a huge achievement this year.

But don’t get me wrong. It’s not all beer and skittles and successes. There were plenty of rejections and far more failures than successes in terms of competitions, and there was also the blunt and sickening realisation that a novel I’d been working for years (a project to which I’d devoted an awful lot of precious time) was dead on the surgeon’s table with no hope of resuscitation. But there’s no point in dwelling on the bad stuff – here’s the good stuff:

• My poem The Lovers in Wartime was featured in the Irish Times Review Section on Saturday 24th January 2015.
• My Poem Orienteering was published in Crannóg Issue 38 in February. This poem was nominated in the single poem category for the Forward Prize 2015.
• My poem Shed was published in The Honest Ulsterman, February 2015 issue.
• My poem Beachcombing was featured in The Sea Anthology in  aid of RNLI, published by Rebel Poetry.
• My poem Two Foxes appeared in Ropes 2015 in April 2015.
• My story The Creaseless Society was shortlisted for the Peoples College Short Story Competition in April 2015.
• My poem Trinity appeared in Issue 5 of Skylight 47 magazine in May 2015.
• I was awarded a bursary from South Dublin County Council to complete my first poetry collection After The Fall.
• My essay The Paradox of Free Will, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the form was published in the June 2015 issue of The Honest Ulsterman.
• I was longlisted for the Dermot Healy International Poetry Competition in August 2015.
• In September my poem Capsized was Highly Commended in the Wild Atlantic Words Poetry Competition and was published in the winners anthology.
• My poem Passion Spent was published in Issue 18 of Boyne Berries.
• In September I received a Commendation in the 2015 Patrick Kavanagh Award for a first collection of poetry.
• My story The Prize was longlisted for the Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition 2015 in September.
• My poem New Year won the Bailieborough Poetry Prize 2015.
• My poetry film Red Line Haiku was featured as part of the Red Line Book Festival and shown at the Civic Theatre in Tallaght on 14th October 2015.
• My poem Ouija was published in The Stony Thursday Book 2015 in October 2015.
• My poem The Man, The Boy and The Map was published in The Raintown Review inthe US.
• Three of my poems feature in The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work, the first anthology from the Hibernian Poetry Group, launched by Macdara Woods on 20th October 2015.
• My novel for children , The Rising Son, was published in December 2015.
• In December I was longlisted for the North West Words Poetry Competition. Winners to be announced in January 2016.
• In December I was longlisted for a WOW Award for short fiction. Winners to be announced in January 2016.
• My short story Flood was published in Issue 7 of The Incubator Journal.
• My poem, Home, is forthcoming in the next issue of Skylight 47 in Spring 2016.

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