Each year Cúirt hosts Poems for Patience and the launch of Cat’s Cradle in association with the Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust. Both of these projects represent meaningful engagement with writing and with literature. Cúirt is proud to support these initiatives and thanks all who were involved in the projects realisation this year.Poems for Patience:
Each year, a poet who is appearing at Cúirt International Festival of Literature selects 21 poems suitable for display in waiting areas of the University College Hospital and Merlin Park Hospital.The poet chooses 21 suitable poems which are then framed and displayed in the Art Corridor, University College Hospital, Galway, during the festival. An official launch takes place and the poet introduces the poems that they have chosen. The initiative is about hope and the healing beauty of art and of writing in times of pain or worry. This year Poems for Patience was selected and introduced by Dennis O’Driscoll.
Born in Tipperary, in 1954, Dennis O’Driscoll has published eight books of his poetry, a collection of his essays and reviews, a book of quotations about poetry, and a collection of his interviews with Seamus Heaney. His awards include a Lannan Literary Award, the E.M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry from the Center for Irish Studies in Minnesota, and the Argosy Irish Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by University College, Dublin in 2009.
READ DENNIS’S SPEECH:
My earliest memory of all is of being a very young patient in Thurles Hospital for the first of my two skirmishes with severe pneumonia. Starched blank feverish mornings they were, in what I assume to be 1956, when I was two years old. I can date this hospitalisation because the nurses, going briskly about their thermometer-and-chart routines, would sing the hit tune of that year – Doris Day’s ‘Que sera, sera.
My earliest memory of all is of being a very young patient in Thurles Hospital for the first of my two skirmishes with severe pneumonia. Starched blank feverish mornings they were, in what I assume to be 1956, when I was two years old. I can date this hospitalisation because the nurses, going briskly about their thermometer-and-chart routines, would sing the hit tune of that year – Doris Day’s ‘Que sera, sera.
Cat’s Cradle:
Organised by Margaret Flannery
Organised by Margaret Flannery
Each year, Kevin Higgins, Merlin Park University Hospital Writer-in-Residence, works with patients from Units 5 and 6 of Merlin Park University Hospital who are receiving long term care. They work together to compile an anthology of their lives and experiences which is then published and launched by the Galway University College Hospital Arts Trust during Cúirt.
This year, volume 6 of the Cat’s Cradle: That Must Be Me! was launched along with Poems for Patience in the Arts corridor at UCHG on Friday 15th April.
For further information about Poems for Patience or Cat’s Cradle please contact Margaret Flannery, Arts Officer, Galway University Hospitals Arts Trust at 091 544979 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
