My work is included in the following anthologies:
- Under the Changing Skies: the best of the Country Diary, 2018-2024
https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9781783353101-under-the-changing-skies/
Published by Faber and Faber in partnership with The Guardian, edited by the Country Diary’s editor Paul Fleckney, and commissioned by Faber and Faber’s Mo Hafeez, with gorgeous woodcut-inspired illustrations by Clifford Harper. This book is a delight.
As Will Dean (at The Guardian) put it: For 120 years, a constant of the Guardian’s history has been Country diary, a short daily column in which a set of correspondents from around the UK write rather beautifully about nature and the countryside near where they live. It is, as far as we know, the oldest newspaper column in the world and, helped by a recent boom in nature writing (just last week we covered the winners of this year’s Wainwright prize for the genre), it’s still going strong.
It features nature writers from all over and UK, including big names like Mark Cocker and Lev Parikian, and many folks like myself. It’s organised on a month by month basis so you can move with the seasons in print as well as personal experience. I’m honoured to have six contributions included. And to have been name-checked by Paul in an interview with Will, when he said: In the book there are diaries from that particular point that are really wonderful in how they captured the strangeness of it: the changes in human behaviour and animal behaviour, and navigating the various rules of where you could go and how to interact. I remember our writer in Northern Ireland, Mary Montague, writing about how breakfast in lockdown was “both strangely quiet and startlingly noisy” because the dawn chorus was the only sound around.
That’s one of the lovely things about the diary – it can, as I mentioned, illuminate some really big stories in some quite interesting ways. If you look at some of the archive and how the column covered wartime, it’s like a downstream bit of news reporting.
So in a world of climate catastrophe we all do our bit. I’m glad that some of my bit is part of this.
- The Book of Life: poems to tide you over. Edited by Grace Wells. Dedalus Press 2022
- Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry. Edited by Paul Maddern, Lifeboat Press, 2021
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- The Word Ark: a Pocket Book of Animal Poems (ed. by Pat Boran, Dedalus Press, 2020
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- Her Other Language: Northern Irish Women Writers address Domestic Violence and Abuse (eds. Ruth Carr & Natasha Cuddington, Arlen Press, 2020)
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- Reading the Future. (Ed. by Alan Hayes), Arlen House, 2018.
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- Washing Windows? Irish Women Write Poetry. (Ed. by Alan Hayes), Arlen House, 2017.
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- Science Meets Poetry 3 (Ed. by Jean-Patrick Connerade & Iggy McGovern), Euroscience Press, Strasbourg, 2013.
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- Four Irish poets / Quatre poètes irlandais (Ed. Clíona Ní Ríordain), Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2011.
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- The Sketch, Skip & Afternoon (Ed. by Kate and Joan Newmann), Summer Palace Press, 2010
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- The Watchful Heart – A New Generation of Irish Poets: Poems and Essays (Ed. by Joan McBreen), Salmon Press, Galway, 2009.
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- Brass on Bronze (Ed. by Denise Blake), Errigal Press, Letterkenny, 2005.
Brass_on_bronze
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- Breaking the Skin (Ed. by Nigel McLoughlin, Matthew Fluharty & Frank Sewell), Black Mountain Press, Belfast, 2002.
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- Beyond the Rubicon (Ed. by Denise Blake), Covehill Press, Letterkenny, 1999.
mary-montague.com 