'A Purse of Shadows' launch in Ballycastle

‘A Purse of Shadows’ will be presented in the Marine Hotel, Ballycastle on Friday, September 3 at 7.30pm.

A member of the Ballycastle Writers’ Group, Heather has read her work at venues throughout Ireland, including:

Poetry Ireland, Dublin; Force 12, Belmullet, County Mayo; Cuirt, Galway; Between the Lines, Belfast; the Wild Geese Festival, Strangford, County Down; Bealtaine Festival, Castlebar, County Mayo and the John Hewitt Spring School, Carnlough, County Antrim.

She was runner-up in the ‘Breathing Places Poet-Tree’ Competition run by the Western Education and Library Board and the BBC in 2007, and in the Winchester University Poetry Prize 2009.

Her first collection of poetry, Almost Dancing, was published by Summer Palace Press in 2004.

Martin Lynch explains: “‘A Purse of Shadows’ is a mature, sure-handed, well-wrought collection of poems. Its themes of family, community, history and mortality demonstrate a forensic, indeed white-heated laser-focus on the central concerns of why and how we exist.

“Heather Newcombe’s evocation of childhood is perhaps one of the strongest elements in this collection. Whether she is remembering the negative impact of religion on her early years through poems like The Legacy or Testament, remembering her older family members in poems like Thinking of Hands and The Lesson or any range of random childhood memories via Gasmask 1959, The Summer I Was Eight or Dog on the Moon, we are never short-changed. The short, sharp journey we are taken on for each separate bunch of words is never less than precise, powerful and beautiful.

“Further into the collection Newcombe serves us up a fine series of poems on her grandchildren, again now particularly pertinent to the post-revolutionary vets like myself, with First Visit Home, Angels Eat Pizza and the beautiful A Boy in Red Pyjamas .

I save the best to the last. Townlands Of Torr, for me, stands with the best-written of rural Ulster. The capacity to make little-known place names like Doey’s Planting, Ballyukin School, Merrick’s Brae and Mary Lynn’s Bridge sound like the most important stops on a very important world journey rests snugly in my affections yet.”