Poem of the week: Cutting Back

for Vivienne and Charles

A year now since our friends cut the grasses

to the ground, the Karl Fosters that you chose

and we planted with such gusto

How Ireland lost its Odyssey: The remarkable story of George Thompson

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20 gripping books: Fiction and non-fiction to read this summer

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The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation – A tale of 10 towns

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The Coffin Ship: A beautifully executed, highly readable, vital book

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‘Perfect,’ you said, when you managed to look out

and surveyed the bare garden –

You knew that it would all flourish again

But you can’t have imagined the coronavirus

whose shape and colour we admired

in a Guardian report from China in January

would bring the garden to such stillness all summer

A hundred bees in the lavender my only company

the grasses growing to their highest yet

Vincent Woods co-directed and produced (with Edwina Guckian) the film Bealach an Fhéir Ghortaigh/Hunger’s Way for Strokestown International Poetry Festival. He directs the Iron Mountain Literature Festival in Co Leitrim