Maureen Boyle lives in Belfast. She began writing as a child in Sion Mills, County Tyrone, winning a UNESCO medal for a book of poems in 1979 at eighteen. She studied in Trinity in Dublin and in 2005 was awarded the Master’s in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. She has won various awards including the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize in 2007 and the Strokestown International Poetry Prize in the same year.  In 2013 she won the Fish Short Memoir Prize. In 2017 she received the Ireland Chair of Poetry’s Inaugural Travel Bursary for work on Anne More, the wife of John Donne and she has just received a sixth award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to support the publication of her debut poetry collection, The Work of a Winter, and to write for her second collection. She taught Creative Writing with the Open University for ten years and teaches English in St Dominic’s Grammar School in Belfast. 

The Work of a Winter contains poems written over sixteen years. They range over history, family relations and stories, observations of birds and nature.  They are often narrative, and many attempt to give voice to women and men whose voices we haven’t been able to hear whether from poverty or gender or social standing: a grandfather who worked in the Mill in Sion; Micheal O’Cleirigh, one of the annalists of the first history of Ireland or a woman who is being forced to give up her child in a home on the Ormeau Road.  It reflects the idea that poetry can give intimate imaginative access to people’s lives.

 

Photo credit: Malachi O'Doherty