Maria Barnas & Keith Payne

The poems of Savage Acres explore the pivotal role of housing and, by extension, community in our lives. Keith Payne revisits the new urban estates of Ireland’s capital city – his own formative playing fields – and their once marginalised and neglected inhabitants who, in time, would become central to the story of the city’s imaginative resistance and cultural rebirth.

‘[A]t once a salute to the life of a single housing estate, and an excavation of the individual lives it contains…’ Mary O’Malley

‘Savage Acres is a terrain, a place of flow, where everyday things lead to unexpected moments of the sublime. Every page contains brilliance and life.’ Adrian Duncan

‘Maria Barnas is a poet who has also written prose and she is a successful artist as well. Not surprisingly, her language is imbued with the mystery of how we perceive material reality. Art offers us a range of ways of looking at life. This can generate a sense of ambivalence and bewilderment in the mind of the reader and seemingly that of the poet too; the result however can be an expansion of one’s horizons. Barnas attempts to find language for what she sees. Maybe this is why she is always in search of the narrative behind the poem or the poem beneath what she observes. This sets her work in the most important trend in contemporary Dutch poetry and poetry criticism, which is mainly concerned with the subject-matter and where the anecdote has pride of place.’ Rozalie Hirs

Maria Barnas’ attendance at West Cork Literary Festival is supported by the Dutch Foundation for Literature/Nederlands Letterenfonds as part of their New Dutch Writing program