Short version
I have been writing poetry since around 1990. My work has appeared in Irish and British literary journals and has been published as a collection in The Blue Guitar (Salmon Poetry, 2011) and previously in a short collection called You've Been Great (Smith/Doorstop, 2008) which won a Poetry Business prize the previous year. I have an MA in English and Creative Writing from Lancaster University.
My father, Arthur Morrin, made up verses in his head while he walked through his farm in Ladytown in Co Kildare. My grandfather, Patrick Morrin, wrote poetry and said it kept him sane when he lost all his money.
Long version
I began to write poetry back around 1990. My work for The Irish Times had taken me to Galway where I had bought (in Charlie Byrne's or Kennys bookshop) a copy of Poetry Magazine featuring Irish poets. It struck me that I could have been among them if I had sufficient self-belief to put in the work required to learn the art and craft of writing poetry and the feeling stayed with me on the train back to Dublin. It was a feeling of time and opportunity lost.
I began to write and gradually learned something of the craft of poetry. If you were to ask me what poetry is, I could not tell you but I doubt if I am alone among poets in that. I began to have poems published in good literary publications in Ireland and the UK, had some success in literary competitions and had a pamphlet of poems and a collection published.
What gave me the most pleasure was the process of learning to write poetry. I liked workshops and how-to books and courses. I learned from distinguished English poets Meg Peacocke (Open College of the Arts) and Jane Draycott (Lancaster University M.A. programme).
It was all enjoyable, an entry into another world with a sense that I was getting somewhere combined with the necessary understanding that I would never get far enough.
My collection, The Blue Guitar, was published by Salmon Poetry in that year and I had got an MA in English and Creative Writing from Lancaster University.
My poetry journey took a detour down a barren road. I became dissatisfied beyond measure with anything new I was writing and edited poems down to nothingness. I didn't stop writing poems but I stopped bringing them to the point at which they could be submitted for publication. Still, I have a couple of hundred poems in draft, many from before this unproductive period.
Meanwhile, I want to take the poems that other people thought good enough to publish over the years and put them on a website for people to read. So that is what this website is about. Hopefully I will have something worthwhile to add in the future but this it for now.
September 2015