Dwelling

Dwelling is a work of excavation: lyrical, archival, and embodied. At its centre is the poet’s great grandmother, likely the subject of eviction during the clearances after the Irish Famine: a figure both spectral and grounding. From her displacement unfolds a meditation on ownership and loss, land and energy, and how memory itself is harvested and converted into power.

This hybrid text moves between poem, essay, and fieldwork, where turbines rise like white demigods over ancestral patches of ground, and wind is an agent of both inheritance and erasure. Through acts of walking, reading, and reimagining, the poet explores how stories and the human trace are preserved — and who preserves them — in a landscape forever rewritten by industry, weather, and the vagaries of history. The reader is drawn into the sense that the past, from ancient myths to emigration stories, is not just subject matter but a living archive that demands an equally compelling, emotionally resonant and formally inventive poetry.

A work of breath and vertigo, Dwelling asks: what does it mean to belong to land that no longer remembers you — or that you no longer recognize?  

Macha Press is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, and the Shared Island Civic Society Fund, managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Government of Ireland.

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Praise for Dwelling