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A Sun’s Eye
by Kieran Darragh O’Malley
Format: Paperback
Publication date: 11th January 2013
ISBN: 978-1-7823715-0-2
Price: €10.00
This first collection of poems began life as juvenile verses in Clongowes, continued in the lost musings of a hyperkinetic youth, and captures almost 20 years of peripatetic thoughts and feelings. It was inspired by W B Yeats line ‘Look up in the Sun’s eye’, the foundation stone inscription of the new Lyric Theatre which has survived its recent re-incarnation. Though life has singed and scarred this book is a small affirmation of the richness of that journey.
Kieran Darragh O’Malley was born in Belfast, and educated at Clongowes Wood College and University College Dublin. He is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist who trained in Canada and USA. In 2006 he returned to Ireland, and now works at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital Crumlin and Charlemont Clinic, Dublin. His parents Mary and Pearse founded the Lyric Players Theatre in Belfast in 1951, which for the first 17 years was a 50 seat theatre at the back of his rambling Victorian family home in 11 Derryvolgie Avenue. Thus, his brothers Donal, Conor and himself grew up in a world of Yeats, Synge and Shakespeare. He has followed that course as well, directing over 60 shows in North America. He founded the Wild Geese Returned in 2011, doing 3 shows at Bewleys Café Theatre, Dublin. He married Siobhan in 2008 , and between them they have 7 adult children living in Ireland, UK, Canada, USA and Australia!
Siobhan O’Malley was born in Belfast, and has a degree in Art from the Ulster College of Art and Design in Belfast. She had her 1st exhibition in Galway in 2005, and recently has been painting Puffins which have sold in Rathlin Island. She previously did illustrations for a book called ‘Garden Plans’ in London in 1974 .She is related to internationally renowned artist and sculptor the late Paddy Marrinan RHA from Belfast.
Sample from A Sun’s Eye
Why do you like the evening tide?
Why do you like the evening tide?
The raven sang as it circled
menacingly close to her head,
She looked up momentarily and smiled,
Then walked further into the oncoming waves
the side of her face transfixed in a luminescent sunset.
Increasingly the rhythmical crashing of the waves
drowned out the rapidly muting voices from the shoreline.
She was past coldness now,
Her heart racing in unison with the wind and the waves.
Why do I like the evening tide she thought again,
Because it brings on the coming night
and closes this long day’s journey.
The raven circles once more,
The sun sets once more,
The waves crash upon an Baile’s strand once more,
But the lone woman is not seen once more.
Dublin, July 9th 2011
(Inspired by Brendan Kennelly’s ‘Picture’)
Published American Academy Child & Adolescent Psychiatry News 2013
