Leanne O’Sullivan

Life
1983- ; brought up on the Beara Peninsula, West Cork; ed. NUI Cork, MA in English, 2006; winner of winner of several of Seacat, Davoren Hanna Award for Emerging Irish Poet, and RTÉ Rattlebag Poetry Slam, author of poetry collections, Waiting for My Clothes (2004), and Cailleach: Hag of Beara (2009).

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Works
Waiting for My Clothes (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books 2004), 64pp.;Cailleach: the hag of Beara (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books 2009), 62pp.

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Criticism
Belinda McKeon, review of Waiting for My Clothes, in The Irish Times (6 Nov. 2004), Weekend: ‘striking confidence and originality ... wonderful subtlety’]; Belinda McKeon, review of Cailleach: The Hag of Beara, in The Irish Times [q.d.) [‘O’Sullivan’s voice sounds with striking confidence and originality - These are poems not just of what it is to be young - but of what it is to be alive; vividly, vibrantly, vulnerably so’; cited in COPAC online.]

Quotations

“The Station Mass for Rita Seer”

Everything scrubbed down and scrubbed again.
Every room followed its own lighted passage,
singing out its corners and the polished dark.
The makeshift altar set, she moved from room
to room, pelting the floors with her slippered walk.

Down in the kitchen the beautiful spread of meals,
the little locks and curls of butter flaring sunlight.
We were like her sentry guards in doorways,
bare-foot, sweeping for motes and blemishes
or eyeing hiding places that suddenly stood clear.

Roses, silver, lace. The glasses breathed against.
Then the gravel-call of priest and neighbours
up the lane and we were all come and go again,
herself gone ahead of us down the last swept path,
snapping incantations, scattering light.

—In The Irish Times (30 Oct. 2010), Weekend, p.10.

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References
Selina Guinness, The New Irish Poets (Bloodaxe Books 2004), incls. selection.