Patricia Burke Brogan is a painter, poet and playwright. Her etchings have won awards at Barcelona and at Listowel International Biennale 1982. Her first poetry collection, Above the Waves Calligraphy, was published by Salmon Publishing in 1994.

Her play Eclipsed has won many awards including a Fringe First at Edinburgh Theatre Festival 1992 and the USA Moss Hart Award 1994. To date there have been 61 productions of Eclipsed on three continents. Stained Glass at Samhain and Eclipsed have been translated into Italian. Eclipsed has also been translated into French and Dutch.

Eclipsed has been excerpted in documentaries and other collected works including The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes 4 and 5. Irish Women Playwrights of the Twentieth Century. Ireland 's Women: Writings Past and Present. Motherhood in Ireland . Repositories of Secrecy and Shame; Magdalen Laundries and Ireland's Architecture of Containment. Sacred Play: Soul Journeys in Contemporary Irish Theatre: Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens:The Changing Face of Irish Theatre. Laundry Basket Hearts: Visions and Revisions of the Magdalene Laundries in the Drama of Patricia Burke Brogan. Theatre Journal 1999 and in Amnesty International Magazine 2002.

Clarenda's Mirror, a three-act play, was chosen by the artistic panel of the 4th International Women Playwrights Conference for the Irish Showcase at the Galway Conference in June 1997. A staged rehearsed reading took place in University College Galway. Patricia received an Arts Council Bursary in Literature in 1993, a European Script Writers' Fund in 1994, and an Arts Council Bursary in Drama in 2005.

If any Galway-based poet deserves publication and decent critical acknowledgement for her literary work (in drama, no less than in poetry) it’s Patricia Burke Brogan, whose ‘new and selected’ is overdue. The title means (in aviation terms) a ‘take-off’ or, more mundanely, an ‘unsticking’; a breaking away, if you like. The cover is a painting, ‘Gaillimh,’ by Brogan. The overall production values of this enterprising independent publisher are extremely high.

I admit to having always been a supporter of Patricia Burke Brogan’s work, understanding too that she was miserably treated by some who wanted to piggy-back creatively on the success of her revelatory play, ‘Eclipsed.’ The poems here range widely in content and reach - there is a poem, ‘Haunted Space,’ written to commemorate the occasion of ‘Eclipsed’ first being produced in the innovative (and, consequently, now gone) Punchbag Theatre, Galway. There is a strong historical awareness running through some of the poems, mingling deftly with discussions on painting and painters, notions of spiritual intimation.

Patricia Burke Brogan’s language does not require decoding and it’s strength lies in this; the reader is aware of an underlying fierce gentleness, a slicing critical eye, coupled with a deceptive simplicity and a disarming linguistic beauty. A good glossary concludes the collection.

All in all, a solid and worthy collection of poems by a mature and disciplined poet of whom more should have been heard long before now. Unlike some others, this ‘New and Selected’ was long-awaited and is a welcome brief of fresh air in a stale room. Congratulations to Galway-based wordsonthestreet.

Fred Johnston, Kiosque Review

Décollage New and Selected Poems

by Patricia Burke Brogan

RRP €12.00 ISBN 9781907017