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Best of Irish Poetry 2010
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Songs of Earth and Light
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CATHERINE PHIL MACCARTHY

Catherine Phil MacCarthy grew up in Co. Limerick and lives in Dublin. Collections include This Hour of the Tide, Salmon Publishing (1994); the blue globe (1998), Suntrap, (2007), and a first novel, One Room an Everywhere (2003), published by Blackstaff Press. She is winner of The Fish Poetry Prize, Bantry 2010, and a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review. Her next collection, The Invisible Threshold is due for publication.

Young Wife

Cows emerge one by one in dawn fog –

dewy coats of colour: short-horn, fresian, roan –

as if their materiality is contingent on

her presence and the early morning scene

in Loughlin’s field below the turn, some after-life

from a painting titled Woman and Cows in Heaven,

while she stands there scanning the white drift –

senses cold from the ground through her feet,

the thin fabric of her dress, under a cross-over apron –

covets the life ahead, as the world about her sleeps,

this freedom of standing alone on a farm of their own

before milking, woman of the house, taking stock.

©2010 Catherine Phil MacCarthy

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MacCarthy's Home Page

MacCarthy in the MLC Writers' Index