Southword Poetry Podcast · Munster Literature Centre

Mary O'Malley: The Shark Nursery

·55 min·3 clips

"Dystopia is sudden" sets up Mary O'Malley's COVID poem "The Lucky Ones."

Mary O'Malley comes in through publication history. Patrick starts with an early review he wrote of her Salmon Collection, then uses that memory to place her beside a shift in Irish poetry publishing. Salmon matters here. The press gave women poets room at a time when Irish lists at Raven Arts Press, Daedalus, and Gallery Press were still thin. Mary O'Donnell belongs in that picture too. The point is not just representation, though that matters. It is the way O'Malley's poems slip the old expectations of the "well-made poem" without turning loose or sloppy. Form stays in the room. Patrick is careful on that point: the poems are made, just not according to one inherited taste for neatness and constraint. Then the conversation opens out into place. O'Malley's years in Portugal, and the poems' movement through coasts, islands, Greenland, California, and home, give the episode its wide map. A wolf appears, and keeps coming back. The host pauses over the wolf licking a hand at the hawthorn, teasing out how a poem can travel far and still snap shut around local symbolic force. COVID changes the air. The second section, which the guest calls the "COVID-y section," pulls the talk away from travel and escape toward lockdown, memory, and communal sound. "The Lucky Ones," written for the National Day of Remembrance and Reflection in March 2022, arrives through COVID's early whisper and growing rumour. Song helps shape it. O'Malley says a lockdown performance, with different voices carrying different stanzas and dialects, stayed in her ear as she wrote. The reading lands with intent. "Dystopia is sudden" opens the excerpt, and the public event turns into graves, bells, streets, and hard visionary pressure. The ending keeps that ritual weight, before the credits bring the listener back to the Munster Literature Centre, its music, and its public arts support.

As heard by us

A measured conversation that places Mary O'Malley in Salmon's publishing history and follows the poems through memory and place.

Mary O'Malley's place in Salmon's late 1980s and early 1990s poetry list comes through clearly here, and the case for it does not feel forced.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want poetry to arrive with history, place, and a careful ear.

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