Time|Fidel Hogan Walsh and Julie Corcoran|e-print|ISBN 9781913108311|€10
One of Dublin City Libraries’ top ten non-fiction books of 2020, poetry by Fidel Hogan Walsh is paired with visual art from conceptual photographer Julie Corcoran.
Love, loss, lust, and life in lockdown are just some of the experiences explored in Fidel Hogan Walsh’s second collection of poetry, Time.
The opening poem, Omen, warns of uncertainty and fear, ‘a foreboding story’s journey’ which speaks to Fidel’s experience at the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020. Julie’s accompanying conceptual piece, Connected, features a girl being pulled dripping from water by an oversized hand, and was created around the same time.
That is what is special about Time. The poems and conceptual pieces were created in the midst of the first lockdown; as the wind swept clouds with a brush—Julie and Fidel responded with a camera and a pen.
Storytelling, by Fidel Hogan Walsh Echoes of silence seeped within the soil. The land and all its hidden secrets meander down on eerie whispers to the roar of the sea. A fierce wind of change beckons — to those reared on folklore and stories of this homeland. Ancestral bones shake in the earth as the stampede of resilient youths, not fearing silence — stand together! Equal parts of a whole generation, proud and loud — telling short stories with tall tales....
Julie reflects on the process:
“Serendipity shadowed us all throughout lockdown, we worked away in our respective bubbles but found an eerie relationship between the poetry and the imagery each week when we checked-in with each other.
By May it became a project that was developing into something very special, so with Fidels’ experience of self-publishing and our local arts office on board we spent the summer getting the collection ready for publication in September 2020 with a virtual launch on Culture Night.”
Copies of Time are available online, or can be ordered at your local library.
