Mary O’Malley was born in Connemara and educated at University College Galway. She lived in Lisbon for eight years and taught at the Universidade Nova there. She served several years on the council of Poetry Ireland and was on the Committee of the Cuirt International Poetry Festival for eight years. She was the author of its educational programme.  She taught on the MA programmes for Writing and Education in the Arts at NUI Galway for ten years, held the Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2013, and has held Residencies in Paris, New York, Trinity College Dublin and the University of Limerick. She has been active in Environmental education for twenty years with a specific interest in the Sea and Bogland, working with a team of marine scientists and musicians. In the early 1990’s, she co-organised a Province wide schools programme, arising out of her work on the organising committee of an international Conference on demilitarisation of the Ocean, held in NUIG. She has published nine books of poetry, including Valparaiso arising out of her Residency on the national marine research ship.  Playing the Octopus and her latest book of poems, Gaudent Angeli are also published by Carcanet. She has also worked on poetry translation from Irish, Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan. She is a member of Aosdana and has won a number of awards for her poetry.  She writes for RTE Radio and broadcasts her work regularly. She has been Writer-in-Residence at NUI Galway, and the University of Limerick, and has held the Chair of Irish Studies in Villanova University in Philadelphia. She lectures and teaches widely, in the U.S. and Europe, particularly in Paris and in various parts of Spain.   She is working on a collection of essays on place, and a new book of poems. She is being awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Galway University this Summer.

• Bernard McKenna, "Such Delvings and Exhumations", in Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Some Male Perspectives, ed. Alex G. Gonzalez (Westport/London: Greenwood 1999) [?p.184].
• Bernard O’Donoghue, review of The Boning Hall (Carcanet), in The Irish Times (21 Dec. 2002), Weekend.
• Eamonn Wall, ‘From Macchu Picchu to Inis Oir: The Poetry of Mary O’Malley’, in South Carolina Review, 38, 1 (Fall 2005), pp.118-27.
• Nessa O’Mahony, review of The Perfect V, in The Irish Times, Weekend (22 July 2006), Weekend.
• Judy Allen Randolph, ‘Mary O’Malley’ [interview], in Close the the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland (Manchester: Carcanet 2010).

It was the roustabout whirl
Of the siege-of-Ennis on the marquee floor
The hot night Summer carnival
The fights, to-be-continued New Year
Easter, St Patrick’s night, young men
Letting off steam with fists. Knives, the scian
The cut-and-come-again
Flash of something dangerous. Borges’ vaiven
Shining in the light of the disco ball. Women
Screamed, one fainted in the direction
Of the knifeman. Up on their tricks
The lads ignored them, upped and skipped
To England, stayed gone until Easter.
What she remembers is the last dance she got
The night it ended - a slow foxtrot
How the band never stopped, just played louder.
Once it was all this and weekly confession
Rehearsed sins. Now it’s a tourist slogan.
Mary O’Malley has written seven books of poetry.

I first saw Eavan Boland in a small bookshop in a Galway side street. It was evening and she was reading from The Journey. I was struck by her delivery, the unique quality of her voice, understated, almost matter of fact. Her accent was unmistakably Irish, but I couldn’t give it a region. There was a certain truth in that. She is from within the Pale, but not regional. In Ireland, where a kind of spirit stomping ground is the birthright of many poets and the justification of others, that brings a certain awkwardness.

[...]

A couple of years later, I found myself in the company of a male poet whose work I greatly admire. Who do you rate, he asked. Diffidently, I trotted out some names. What could you possibly have in comnlon with Eavan Boland? How do you mean, I asked, partly in surprise and partly out of devilment. And of course it was a loaded question. I am the daughter of a fisherman and a woman from the west coast of Ireland. My territory is the sea, the shore, the so-called cottage surrounded not by lawns but by bad land that grew nothing. There was nothing suburban about that, nor about the small county council house we were living in at the time, nor the years I had spent in Lisbon up until then. No social privilege. And I love hurling and don’t mind football, faction fighting or the pub. But he knows there’s more to a writer than mere biography. Why suspend that perception in the case of a woman? I doubt the same question would have been asked of a man. I mention the incident because Eavan Boland’s suburban territory has so often been mentioned with intent. A bit like criticising Elizabeth Bishop for [252] writing about travel, or Marianne Moore about natural history. The question would have made more sense if it was suggesting that I wasn’t in her intellectual or poetic league, a term a lot of our male poets are very fond of, and which I like because its use leaves one in no doubt that we are not starting off with a level pitch. So to speak. But it wasn ‘t. This man knew or could have guessed that a rectangle of light from my kitchen window would reveal a lawn surrounded by faces peering in, just waiting for the flick of the switch: badgers, foxes, bears, spectres and all kinds of quare hawks, while hers would be calm, ordered, alive to classical possibilities. But he didn’t understand how desperately I sometimes depend on that image from “Nocturne”, how badly I need even someone else’s “electric room”, the architecture of light cast by a fine intellect.