Wren Maire Morrissey Cummins
Patrons: Anthony Wade
Arthur Broomfield
Attracta Fahy
James Finnegan
Simon Lewis
Mary Lee
Editor: Orla Fay
Published by Drawn to the Light Press
ISSN 2737-7768
Next issue: June 2026
https://drawntothelightpress.com
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Drawn to the Light Press is edited, designed, and produced by Orla Fay.
Cover design Wren by Maire Morrissey Cummins.
The works included in this issue are copyright of the poets and artists ©2026 and may not be reproduced or changed in any way without the permission of the individual author.
Drawn to the Light Press is ©2026 of the editor.
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Editorial
Welcome to issue 17 on this first day of March 2026. Spring has sprung and the sunlight is stronger and more giving, the daffodils bask in its nourishment. Last night I was dreaming of cherry blossoms and soon they will be sweeping their way to us on April breeze. St. Patrick’s Day and Easter are just around the corner, and what too of May and her glamour.
I picture the grasses growing tall here by the glassy River Boyne and the whiteness coming upon the hawthorn trees. I see swans and blue skies, dark swallows, bright mornings and longer days, greenery that grows like fire.
Thanks again to everyone who contributed to the magazine and to Maire Morrissey Cummins for Wren
Congratulations to The Little Fires of Brigid Poetry CompetitionWinners 2026
Overall Winning Poem – What Name Shall We Give The Baby by Nollaig Rowan
Joint Runners-Up
So, tell me by Maria Hoey & Bonfire by Stephen Brock
Orla Fay 01/03/2026
First Day of Spring
A girl with a bike makes figures of eight as I watch from the step of the house.
A girl with a smile waves as she cycles the narrow road shadowed by forest.
On the first day of sunlight camelias are budding, daffodils push through the soil. The air is alive with plans and new growth, leaves twitch in a zephyr, the bay is serene. People walk lightly, sun freckling their faces, bicycles creak as they pass.
Blackbirds are chirping in trees that are leafing,
each person I see has a smile. On the first day of spring
a girl with a rope nooses herself to a branch and now she is hanging where blackbirds are singing their hymn to the heavens that winter has ended.
Faye Boland
Dalgan Snowdrops Orla Fay
Waiting for Snowdrops
By Thursday,
I’ll be waiting for the snowdrops to arrive. But the bed is stiff, and my mouth is dry, and all the kitchen windows are condensed with cold.
I’ll light candles merely to seem alive.
By Thursday,
I’ll be writing letters to the postman, eating away at picture frames. We’re keeping up appearances. Family toasts the new year, and I cast my silent vote to hide the fact that I’m not sleeping.
By Thursday,
I’ll drain these throw away resolutions down the sink. Steep in the blow of confusion instead. Perhaps when I lie awake I’ll have finally earned my place rather than just inspecting the bruising.
By Thursday,
I’ll dig up what’s left of the snowdrops, and watch dawn drench into rooftops. Soft rain will thaw the soil as crocuses brave the garden trail. Someday, I’ll brush sunlight with my fingertips.
Rosie Aziz
To a RagTree
Out beyond the beaten path my words tip up the air by the way they sway and flutter.
If the wind strews them asunder, or they run with each thunder shower, surely this is what I intend: that they utter me down to the ground, in and out of my tree. Regaling spirits high and low, tapping into the local powers –
and even if I grow gnarled in hand and foot, with thickenings
gathered at my neck and waist, with hobbled heart and desiccated brow,
I would still have the poem say: there he leaps away, the child I will always be –through grace and give of greening branches he dances, who prompted me.
Patrick Deeley
April
Bluebells march in swathes over woodland floors, decorating with sky as they go.
Thirty diamond encrusted days, showers prepping the ground for blooming May.
Romans no longer chant ‘Aprilis, Aprilis’, beating on leather strap shields to herald the re-awakening.
The opening Zodiac Aries, motivated, confident, passionate, enters the sun, begins its ecliptic path.
April holds its fools briefly, concentrates on daisy bouquets.
Martina Madden
Lost Scarves
Blossom flares— like lost scarves tossed into the sun’s slow spill across the grove.
Somewhere, a blackbird etches its calls into the morning wake.
The sky— still stitched with night— tacks itself apart.
No one watches.
I stir— snagged, tight-chested on time’s short hem— before spring, barefoot and forgotten, lifts a finger to my lips, traces pollen on my throat, and floats a new air onto my skin.
I am draped in wonder…
cradled in a shallow of light, damp earth beneath my soles:
before being, as if pain had never spoken.
Simon Willson
Shifting
Big news along the shore— absent for weeks, the brent geese are passing through on their migration north, and the faces of the small gulls have darkened again. Spring.
Daylight grows longer, the evenings milder and the street pigeons, seemingly out of place, peck with gusto among the briny pebbles revealed by the receding tide.
Tim Dwyer
This Beautiful Pair
Two swans flying over a car park. Four wings spread wide, white swooping as they soar through the sky and gracefully descend, landing on orange flippers, their heads held high, surveying the empty football pitch marked out in lines of white. Beating and buffeting the early March air, avoiding the dark feathers of a passing, confused crow, wondering why this beautiful pair are so far from the lake. They nod to one another, thinking the same thought as their feet leave the damp earth and fall back towards their chests like a foetus trying to find more space, ensconced in a womb, letting their wings elongate, two white bars rippling, rising in the grey sky, higher than the greening hedges and back down, at the abandoned goalposts, trying to remember where they last saw water.
Chelsea Bright
Recurring Resilience
Darkening days beckon dark demons' old heckles. Dormant during spring's surge, and summer's splurge, they resurrect in Samhain's veil-flaying foliage.
I fear their presence. I search skywards for sun-swords, one escapes its scabbard of suffocating clouds, it won't slay the murmurings of reawoken ghosts, but help keep at bay their recurring seasons of echoes, their spectral shadows stare back, cackle-crack, hiss and spit through winter's fall-coloured flames -
I'm safe in brave fire's light - I drift in and out of sleep until I find myself standing afresh in February frost, I cast cold cinders to fruit-rot, rooted in soil and time,
a shift disperses in an Imbolc breath of fresh-fiery air, immerses faint despair among shoots of opal hopea sprig of silence, a candle prayer for spring's resilience.
Finn Cassidy
Mulholland Drive
for Dermot Healy
It is like stepping into a secret, one, privy to all, but me. Forgotten bins need collecting, a pre-dawn pantheon demands it. Winking driveways, tissues of moonlit frost, track the wheelie bin’s ramblings. All is quiet. The only sound, my rumbling through life.
Biting boots break ice, like snaping bars of chocolate, and I remember you. Your Fool’s Errand, and I, seven stone, wasting in a hospital bed, peeping from under a thin blanket. Those close, they thought I was dying. Somehow, you knew, I was merely watching your documentary on the hospital T.V. –birds returning home, stitching the sky.
In Sligo, I met you, told you, how your words fed my solitude, returning me to a world of solid dream. Your eyes. Already elsewhere. Blurred with the great other. You wished me, All the luck in the world.
I thought of Mulholland Drive. Naomi Watts arriving in Hollywood, her dreams of movie stardom – golden, warm and bright as an L.A. sunrise. An elderly couple wish her: All the luck in the world, only to return later, to haunt her.
Haunt me, Dermot Healy. I’ll drench you in mornings where I cannot distinguish between the streetlights and the stars, the mountain mist and your eyes, my life, and the living silence.
Darren Donohue
Daffodils
Sunlight pours into the afternoon kitchen. Scent swirls from the vase, assails my nostrils, cues a memory.
March winds whip Mrs Newell’s hoary hair soft eyes behind big round pale-rimmed spectacles. Dark brown woollen self-knit cardigan and floral-patterned crossover apron. With the sweep of her arm pick all ye like. We have the run of her meadow carpeted infinite yellow and white. Blue greedy eyes too big for small hands but we start into a picking frenzy lost in narcotic reverie in the swaying head bobbing expanse at the Friary House.
Teresa O’Connor Diskin
A Little Gold Goes a Long Way Lynda Tavakoli
The Crozier Stage
Their fiddleheads hide tiny leaflets, waiting to unfold and flatten outward, in a range of greens. Ferns may have no flowers but their furling like a tiny, curled fist or the long snout of a seahorse, brings rumour of awakening. Slowed down over hours with a canon digital, when the slow reveal begins it’s as though the plant is looking around at spring, moving with the grace of a ballet dancer.
Gerard Walsh
Phenology*
Spring moves up the country at walking pace
alighting on the shingle beaches of the Channel coast strolling country lanes and crossing fields
bringing budbreak and leafburst igniting orchard blossom. Copper speckles poplars, and northern hardwood forests fill with birdsong and hazy green. From south to north each sign of Spring takes three whole weeks to navigate the country.
As the temperature lifts another sweltering degree the plants leap five days sooner into leaf and Spring has upped her pace now, walking faster
her breath is the Sahara, chasing migrant birds before her. She’s picking up her skirts these days; she begins to run.
Judi Sutherland
* The study of periodic events in biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate, as well as habitat factors
Oakwood’s
Ethan*
for Lee
(1966 - 1991)
I did not know the world at that moment only the rain came as if the world knew me kneeling where he lay
His mares gathered each beauty a prayer “To the earth To the sky
To returning ghosts of springtime. Give this dear one peace. He was a little crazy but he was a good bay.”
PD Lyons
*Was a dark chestnut Morgan horse registered with the American Morgan Horse Association (AMHA) as #16783
Spring
Snowdrops glowing like jellyfish in the wild grass of the bottom field, the top field— puncturing the road ditch opposite our cottage.
Feral, cold-clinging, orphaned beauty ascending out of bulbs someone had thrown away sometime no one could remember— from the graveyard of the unwanted they did the only thing they knew how to do. They grew.
Giulia NíChonmara
Uprising
Beneath the machair on Omey Island a colony of primrose surging towards the light
Sands shifting over cockles in the midden a human skull watching from the warren
Whipping wind scattering the foreshore a tooth lodged in the shell-rich plain
Skies opening for a wasted corncrake a mandible floating in milk green sop
A famine village sacked by staghorn beetles three hundred femurs breach the burial ground
An army of bones on the Hill of Women little raven surveils the blasted domain
An absent doe draws a rising scream venerated, forgotten, risen again
Spring is no gentle thing
Annie Egan
Ushers
I swallow slivers of morning light spindly beams streaking through curtain cracks my eyes heavy half open
bare birch trees outside a stirring two-note tune delivered teach-er teach-er teach-er teach-er I lean to these tiny feathered messengers white cheeked yellow vested in black ties giddied by the lengthening day their good news dispatched to others poised on nearby wires almost hysterical they join in joyous release unstoppable carrying life forward
I lift my face to a hesitant sky let spring’s ushers take hold
Anne Donnellan
Bridget and the Bananas - fantasia
at Imbolc –
Fadó fadó, a boat crewed by daoine gorma was beached san oirthear, after a storm which ripped its sail and shattered its rudder. The men were an oddity to the ruddy faced locals who thought their curragh enormous, like a meeting house on water, with fire on board. It was not recorded in the annals how they got to Cill Dara along the Esker Riada with tackle and gear salvaged from their wreckage; but a storyteller got wind of the amazed pleasure which overwhelmed the Abbess when one of the sisters arrived in the refectory bearing a gift from ‘strange, dark-skinned people’: a food-basket with a rack of sickle moons, like skin to the touch, yellowy-soft, a sun-filled sweetness. The visitors were amazed at the reception of their gift. ‘Banan’, they said, pointing to the basket, ‘méara móra’, adúirt sí, and divided them among the company. As the sisters chanted buíochas, the sailors added their music with reed pipe and goatskin drum, hosts and guests as one, a taste of heaven which put them all faoí dríocht. And the daoine gorma departed whence they had come. ‘What was it we ate last night?’ ‘Bananaí,’ she said. And that name has stayed with us to this day.
Philip Quirke
Petals
Our faces were reflected on the window as we stared out through rain darkening the grey pavements and as we stared a slug slid up against the flow on the glass and as a snail swirled its secret script the pressure of the darkness drove us out of the house to the slimy path and the woods where the wren blasted its song up into the rain and robins and blackbirds sang at the tops of the budding bushes and as we walked under a cherry tree we followed a bubbling spring where two petals swirled on the surface from puddle to puddle and the brightening sky lit up the streams the petals skimmed across and we followed them on paths that had been hidden to us our whole lives and then we reached a beach we'd never seen and threw pebbles and sticks out into the glittering sea
Paul Bavister
February, early
Each star shuffles back to bed, darkling and drabbish. Come morning, windows
arthritic with rain are swollen with night-stories; but watch, these widows
become young again, hair in rollers, dream-sewing a new dress for spring: they hum as they work, hand-stitched indigo hems, each thread bright as bird song –
Olga Dermott-Bond
First Reflections Lynda Tavakoli
“My” Tree
“Everybody should own a tree this time of year. . . in the way that one comes to own a tree by seeing it at the turn of the road, or down the street, or in a park, and watching it day after day, and seeing color come to the leaves. That way it is your tree whenever you choose to pass that way. . .. And it will be yours as long as you can remember.”
– Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons
She lives three blocks away from here. Let me introduce you. If you say it slowly, her name is also a poem. Populus deltoides Bartram ex Marsh subspecies monilifera (Aiton) Eckenwalder.
She “contains multitudes,” as old Walt Whitman would say—of science, and other people’s lives, all men, as it happens, who “discovered” her along plains and hills and streams and rivers, and even climbing mountainsides. Though those who first knew her called her Ti’is, Wagachun Waga cha, Paako, Natakaaru, Mda zho.” Alamo.
I call her Lightning Woman, for she has survived, as we women often do, a strike near the heart that nearly killed her: the loss of love, a child, some great thing in our lives that strips us of our skin, leaves us open to Winter, to Nature feasting on us. That’s the way. It’s a myth to say that a tree “heals” from such a wound. Look closely. She’s left bare the long spiral patch
that runs like an open field across which her life is written. She’s curled the edge of bark an expert magician of wood, and sent life elsewhere, seeking light with limbs as open as arms, Spring after Spring, sharing herself with the sky, catching the drift of pollen. from her fellows, seeding the air with her labors. She’s an old woman, to have been left here, flourishing above an ancient gravel pit carved into a park. The coin of her leafy realm, for she is queen of all the nearby species, is green, is gold.
Even in winter, leafless, you can read her story in the calligraphy of branches, sorrow and joy etching themselves into her star-studded biography. She curves just there, at the sky-strike, graceful in a life of restoration, of reach and reach and reach. . .
Kathleen Cain
Bearing Witness
In spite of it all, willow warbler and chiff chaff are back from the warm south, blackcap song flows through oak and willow, the starling makes a star overhead beak full of straw for the nest box and when I step outside in late dusk I smell sweetness, a garden at full pelt. Cuckoo calls keep pace with cuckoo flowers scattered across the neighbour’s field, purpling verges up the road. Birch and rowan have put on their best green, fresh leaves sucking in sunlight, blue tits ferry caterpillar cargoes to their young, house martins rebuild at the gable. In the pond fat tadpoles shoal while newts rise to sip the air, agitate the water’s skin, make its light dip and glitter, speckled bellies flashing as they turn. Water boatmen row upside down, water skaters skitter over surface tension. And humans? We have our own tension, bearing witness to our beautiful messed-up world.
Nicki Griffin
Release From my classroom window
I watch this single leaf’s spasm as it struggles to free itself from cobwebs hung along a sill.
Tiny torso, moving back and forth, back and forth like a trapeze artist about to take flight, remembering she has done this before she can go, leave, relent, recalling what comes from release: air, space, a ferrying breeze, room to breathe –
I want to reach through this pane and brush the sticky entrails away.
Mollie Berry
Foothold
Nests of brittle twig, mottled feathers, erupt with little chicks, anxious in their bone cages disrupting the gentle waves pounding frequencies of terror as you both step on stone edges licked by the Atlantic searching the abyss for treats
Amanda Shannon
The Clouds I Recall
As a child, my favourite thing to do was lie in the grass and tell stories with the clouds. That was the only safe space I knew then. Hidden by grass and saved by the sunshine.
By the time I was a teen, I had stopped trying to tell their stories altogether no one seemed to believe them when I did. The clouds felt heavy and there was nothing of value they had to teach me anymore.
In my twenties, I ignored the clouds completely unless stoned, I tried to count them but forgot which way was up or down!
My thirties arrived with a flutter; clouds were the least of my worries. Busy pretending to be someone who fits into a place or time.
So, when I turned forty I forgot how to be mad at them and lay down in a field once again. The clouds were exactly where I’d left them and their stories greeted me like an old friend.
Rachel Roberts
My Year with the Hare
In February, I arrive, new to this place, and she spies from the scant yellow gorse. Or she sits in the lane, high on her heels — and I slow my step and pause.
In March, the golden bloom spreads and warms the view. Spring is in her ear, twitch, twitching it anew.
At April’s end, I come again, and while she’s nesting in her form, surprised by heat and clear blue skies, I joy in being warm.
I leave once more, and May unfolds in long days of fiery glow. She flits through ferns, and grasses green — pit-pats soft and low.
By June, she travels in corridors, carved by her own passage, her ears aloft — her young concealed —wary of trespassers.
On our return, she lifts her paw — July’s heat and voices thrumming — she tilts her head, the air’s alive with scent and insects humming.
In August — free — her young are strewn, but more intruders come along. Shattered calm, she stays away, her instincts true and strong.
In September’s rest the land is hers, and, emerging, not arriving, she stands steady on the edge of days — shortening, dimming, surviving.
Through October’s damp and misty hours, she zigzags silver dew.
Her hardy back, dun and slick, bares Autumn’s washed-out hue.
In November, dark furze spikes through briars and withered berries, and she climbs the ridge and sniffs the air for all the cold wind carries.
December flows through muddy lanes, and trickles on to where her frosty trail runs lone and slight, in moonlight bleak and bare.
From January’s storms and gales, she hides, and I yearn for signs, of the clock to tick to lighter days — and her return in lighter times.
In my fixed gaze, the wild wind waits, and gentle whispers blur, and then at last the circle turns, and life begins to stir.
At break of day, she knows me now, and no longer stilled by fear, she ventures forth — sure-footed, strong — and claims the newborn year.
SandravanBeurden-Hopkins
Incantation
May neither wealth nor sadness overwhelm you, may sunshine follow in your tread, may bitter winds not chide you nor poverty’s chill find grip.
May dreams not leave you empty, nor shadow you with regret, may music echo your weary step down every crooked path.
May joy and light embrace you like a blue scarf wrapped around and may you find redemption In the everyday, wherever it may lead.
Kevin Dowling
Crimson
my first memory is red a dress my mother wore as she kissed me good night in crimson twilight
red tulips danced in our garden that spring, swaying on spindly stems in the breeze I danced, too, for the mindless joy a child has when the world is new
the world is old now I have seen too much still, I take joy when I can singular moments in the evening when the light slants just so, I dance in crimson twilight
Joanne Draper
The Little Fires of Brigid Poetry Competition Winners 2026
Overall Winning Poem – What Name Shall We Give The Baby by Nollaig Rowan
Joint Runners-Up
So, tell me by Maria Hoey &
Bonfire by Stephen Brock
Saint Brigid by Patrick Joseph Tuohy (1894 – 1930) Oil on canvas
What Name Shall We Give The Baby
I was told that a wise woman from the East Travelled from Duibhlinn to found an oak church In a place full of birds she called Cill Dara.
In my world the Abbesses made the rules Lording over Abbots in that matriarchal Family in the eighth century.
I made the long journey from bloated belly Down the birth canal to be born in February To my Abbess mother Aifric and her holy sisters.
I was baptised with fire stoked in the plains of Cill Dara A cloak wrapped round me for warmth in winter My eyes held the knowledge of centuries.
Abbots looked on, helpless, but promised Their assistance in manly tasks of wood-chopping Deer-slaying, moon-watching and protection.
Meanwhile I grew, nameless so far Winter robins and wise women gathered ‘We must give the child a name, a dedication’.
I squirmed in my woven wool, itchy and irritated Do they not remember the wise woman from the East? ‘Brrr, brrree’ I mumbled from my swaddling.
‘Bríd’ one said ‘Bridgie’ said another ‘Breege’ said a third, not daring to shout
The sacred name of their founder.
When Abbess Aifric spoke she was calm And inspired ‘My baby is Bríd-óg Like our saint and her spideog.’
Hail Brigid, goddess of fire Of healing, of water And of women doing their own thing.
Nollaig Rowan
So, tell me
So, tell me, which was it, Brigid, Bríde, Brigantia? Even your name is a mystery.
And who and what were you, Saint?
Goddess?
Christian? Pagan? Or did you have one foot in the past the other in the now, as a wise woman would know how? They claim you as their patron, you know. all sorts, poets and brewers, scholars and midwives sailors and cows.
A rum mix if you ask me. And I have to admit that I find it hard to pin you down, you turner of water into beerI like that by the waythe common touch cooler than the whole wine thing… But I like to think that you were all woman, flesh and blood brazen and bold, no man would take your name from you or anything else you did not choose to give.
And I’ll think of you, on this day of Brigid this Imbolc this space between the darkness and the light where, whoever and whatever you were, you still shine bright.
Maria Hoey
Bonfire
“It was a pleasure to burn”
- Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Beneath, below
Toiling on barren soil, the garden of my heart
I search for kindling down every avenue, each life I cycle through
And dole them out to the flames
Devour my shame, my grace; feed me your words in return
Burn bright, little bonfire, burn
Great flames lick skyward like a pack of ravenous dogs
You are my will and testament, my hungry God
A thrall to your beck and call, whore for your scorched breath on my neck
Without a care for what’s next or what came before
At no alter do my knees fold save yours
We dance madly in the garden, naked and aching, night after night
Crackling flames my lullaby; a fireside serenade
All your secret teachings I long to tease and unearth
Burn bright, little bonfire, burn
Make me your blue-eyed pagan; I’ll sing your sermon in this singed tongue
Til my throat stings and my lungs combust
Til I’m ashen faced, lamed by age, til all the nails in my coffin rust
I’m breathing smoke, savouring the taste of soot
Sure the heat hurts but God, I adore your touch
Set me alight, make a pyre of my heart
Burn bright, little bonfire, burn
The garden is stark, charred, cracked open wide
It bears no fruit save the inferno I have nurtured like a child I am beneath, below. I am so far below. So come, devour me whole, eat me fast, eat me slow, bite, chew, swallow
Make me yours in black baptism; wedded to the light. Make me an ember, colour of twilight, sailing through the night like a blazing party favour I want to live in the glow of your holy locus I’ll starve to keep you full, so the spark may survive
Burn bright, little bonfire, burn
Fucking burn me alive
Stephen Brock
Notes on Contributors
Rosie Aziz is an emerging English-Kurdish poet from Manchester and an alumna of the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing. Having appeared in Drawn to the Light Press, Lighthouse, and Obsessed with Pipework, her poetry fuses her love of lore, mythology and fairy tales with honest, everyday reflections.
Paul Bavister has published three poetry books, the latest being The Prawn Season (Two Rivers Press). His recent work has appeared in Glass, Porridge, and Ink, Sweat and Tears. His poem, Starlings came highly commended in the RSPB/Rialto poetry competition
Mollie Berry writes and teaches literature in London.
Faye Boland won the Poet's Shout Poetry Slam 2025, the Robert Leslie Boland Prize 2018, the Hanna Greally International Literary Award 2017. She placed third in the Bere Island Poetry Competition 2024. She was highly commended in the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition 2024 and the Desmond O' Grady Competition 2019. Her collection Peripheral was published in September 2018 by The Manuscript Publisher.
Chelsea Bright is a writer and editor from county Westmeath. She founded Sparks Literary Journal in 2023. Her poetry has been featured in The Poetry’s Dead Anthology vol 2, Swim Press and The Martello Journal. Her poetry explores the things that many of us leave unsaid, even to ourselves.
Stephen Brock is a North Dublin based writer and poet. He has previously been published in the Martello Journal and the Stoney Writers’Collection.
Kathleen Cain is a poet and nonfiction writer from Colorado. Her poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, Abandoned
Mine, Bristlecone and many other literary magazines and anthologies. Nature is her religion, poetry her liturgy. https://www.kathleencainwriter.com
Finn Cassidy (he/him/his) is an Irish poet, living in the FrenchAlps. His poems have featured in a variety of international poetry journals and anthologies. He is currently completing his first full poetry collection: Notions of Starkology-Codology For all things poetry-related, you can contact Finn at fcassidy@email.com and on X @FinianCassidy.
Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children’s writer from Loughrea. His tenth collection, Keepsake, was published by Dedalus Press in 2024. His awards include the Eilis Dillon Children’s Book of the YearAward, The Dermot Healy Poetry Prize, and The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy PoetryAward.
Olga Dermott-Bond is from Northern Ireland and lives in Warwickshire. She has published two pamphlets: apple, fallen and A sky full of strange specimens. Her first collection Frieze is published by Nine Arches Press. Her poetry has been featured in The Guardian, and she won the Strokestown International Poetry Competition 2025.
Teresa O’Connor Diskin’s work has been published nationally and internationally, including, among other publications: The Galway Literary Review, Skylight 47, Reach Poetry, Drawn to the Light Press, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Magpie, and she was shortlisted for Poems for Patience 2019 and 2022, and New Irish Writing 2025.
Anne Donnellan has published two collections of poetry with Revival Press Limerick. Her second collection If Only We Could Bottle It was published in December 2025. Anne’s work has appeared in several poetry journals including Crannog, Skylight 47 and Ink Sweat and Tears. She curates and hosts the Poetry Lobby Galway.
Darren Donohue’s work is published in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Cyphers, Irish Times, Sunday Independent, Strokestown Poetry Anthology, Dedalus Press, Honest Ulsterman, RTE Culture website and Books Ireland. He received the Dennis O’Driscoll Literary Award, 2020. His debut poetry collection titled, Secret Poets is published by Turas Press.
Kevin Dowling lives and works in County Kilkenny. Member of Clogh writing group in North Kilkenny. Has been writing mainly poems and stories for a few years. Poems published in The Kilkenny Anthology, Kilkenny Poetry Broadsheet, Stony Thursday Book, Where I Am, Riposte. Poems also included in Kilkenny poetry phone line.
Joanne Draper is a poet and writing instructor for a small community college in southern Idaho, USA, as well as for Amherst Writers and Artists. Her most recent publication was in Silo Literary and Visual Arts Journal.
Tim Dwyer was raised in Brooklyn by Irish immigrant parents, and now lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland. His debut full collection, Accepting The Call (templarpoetry.com), has won the Straid Collection Award. His poetry appears regularly in Irish, UK and international journals and previously in Drawn To The Light.
Annie Egan lives by the sea in Galway, Ireland with her partner, three daughters and too many pets. She works as a human rights researcher. She has recently been published in Abridged, Crannóg, Culture Matters, Drawn to the Light, Poets Republic, The Bangor Literary Journal, The Belfast Review and The Madrigal.
Orla Fay is the editor of Drawn to the Light Press. Her debut poetry collection Word Skin was published by Salmon Poetry in 2023.
Nicki Griffin lives in Mountshannon, East Clare. She has two collections published by Salmon Poetry: Unbelonging, 2013
and Crossing Places, 2017. A third collection, the Dark & the Light, is forthcoming. She has been published in a wide variety of anthologies and journals. She hosts a monthly poetry evening in East Clare.
Maria Hoey has been writing since she was eight-years-old. Her poetry and articles have been widely published and her short story, Reading Brother Boniface, was shortlisted for the Michael McLaverty Short Story Award. Her debut novel, THE LAST LOST GIRL, was published in July 2016 and has gone on to be shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Debut Award 2018 and the Annie McHale Debut Award 2018. Her second novel, ON BONE BRIDGE, was published in July. BAD SWEET THINGS was published in Kindle e-book in September 2021.
Maria lives has one daughter, Rebecca, and lives in Portmarnock, Co Dublin with her husband, Garrett and their moustached cat, Midge.
Ignatius Lally is a playwright & photographer living in Fermanagh, where the picture was taken. He has written plays for BBC Radios 4 & 3, had two plays at the Edinburgh Festival and was writer in residence at Solent People’s Theatre. The picture was taken on 2nd January.
Paudrig Lee is a poet from Killeagh village in East Cork. Smoking Bees, his debut chapbook, reflects his interests as a local historian and photographer, with striking observations of the natural world, historical injustices, and family dynamics shaping the collection. His second chapbook, Chance Meeting, will be published this spring.
PD Lyons born and raised in the USA. Since 1998 has resided in Ireland. Lyons received Mattatuck College Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, Bachelor of Science with honours from Teikyo Post University. The work of PD Lyons has appeared in many formats throughout the world.
Martina Madden works in the heritage sector and is inspired by her creative surroundings, people and a sense of place. Martina had work published in 2025 in a number of literary journals including Ragaire Literary Magazine Issue 3, The Stony Thursday Book Issue 50 and pending in the Quillkeepers Press.
Giulia NíChonmara (Julia McNamara) is a poet from Cork whose work explores womanhood, identity, and intergenerational trauma. She holds an MA from the University of Limerick and was shortlisted last year in Ó Bhéal's 12th Five Words International Poetry Competition.
Philip Quirke had Journey to the Shore published by Lapwing (2008). Two self-published followed: Bruised Reeds (2015) and Taking Stock (2024). Continues to write. Regularly submits poems and prayers to HookofFaith, website of Diocese of Ferns. Lives in Wexford town, sharing life with Margaret (Galvin) and their son Ibar.
Rachel Roberts is an emerging writer based in Carlow, whose work is informed by a rich background in theology, philosophy, yoga, and creative writing. Her first short story, ‘The Hand in the Grave’, was published in The Shadow of the Steeple when she was eleven. Other short stories are featured in the anthologies Original Sins and By the Light of the Moon.
Her essay ‘When all is not lost’ is featured in the online publication The Green Diary. She has prose poetry featured in Niamh Cunningham’s socio-eco art practice, ‘The Memory Palace of Trees’. In 2013, she won the Carlow Literary Award and was a runner-up in 2014. She is also a winner of the 2022 Power of Words short story competition and is featured in their anthology Locked In.
Her most recent publications were the selected poems ‘Rituals’ & ‘Jealous Boots’ featured in The Banyan Review Autumn Edition ‘23. In September 2023, she received funding from both the Arts Council of Ireland and Carlow County Council to host a Culture Night event,
‘The Koan of Yin & Storytelling’. She is currently working on her first poetry collection.
Nollaig Rowan, poet and short fiction writer has had work published in Incubator, Skylight 47, Boyne Berries, From the Well, Angle and other journals. She's regularly featured on RTE radio 1 Sunday Miscellany. One of her poems was selected in this year's poems for patience competition. Nollaig divides her time between Dublin and Sherkin Island, West Cork.
Amanda Shannon is a poet and performing artist based in County Clare. Her poetry has appeared on Eat the Storms, in the In the Air anthology, and on Clare FM. She serves on the Steering Committee of the Clare Poetry Collective and is currently developing her first poetry collection.
Judi Sutherland is an English writer currently living in Malahide, North County Dublin. She has published two pamphlets, The Ship Owner's House (Vane Women Press 2018) and Following Teisa (The Book Mill, 2021).
Lynda Tavakoli lives in Baillies Mills, County Down. She is a professional member of The Irish Writers Centre and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Awards. Her poetry, prose and photography have been widely published in numerous anthologies both at home and abroad.
Sandra van Beurden-Hopkins is a British and Irish poet living between Ireland and the Netherlands. Her work is rooted in memory, landscape, and family history, with particular attention to rural life, migration, and return. She writes from lived experience and close attention to place.
Gerard Walsh is from Co. Kildare. His poems have been published in Writers Forum, Drawn to the Light Press, Apricot Press, Skylight 47, New Isles Press, Anomaly Poetry, Longford Poetry Anthology and he was runner-up in Trim Poetry Competition 2022. He is a part-time library assistant.
Simon Willson is a musician and emerging poet with a PhD in composition from Aberdeen University. After experiencing significant hearing loss, he now focuses on poetry and is developing his debut collection.
Drawn to the Light Press Spring 2026
Faye Boland Patrick Deeley
Martina Madden Simon Willson
Tim Dwyer Chelsea Bright
Finn Cassidy Darren Donohue
Teresa O’Connor Diskin
Gerard Walsh Judi Sutherland
PD Lyons Giulia NíChonmara
Annie Egan Anne Donnellan
Philip Quirke Paul Bavister
Olga Dermontt-Bond Lynda Tavakoli
Joanne Draper Rosie Aziz
Kathleen Cain Paudrig Lee
Nicki Griffin Mollie Berry
Amanda Shannon
Rachel Roberts
Sandra van Beurden-Hopkins
Kevin Dowling Ignatius Lally
& the winners of The Little Fires of Brigid Competition
€20
ISSN 2737-7768
