Unsafe by Geraldine O'Kane
Geraldine O’Kane’s anticipated first collection is an impactful introduction to a voice that is compassionate, vivid and courageous. The poems weave between spaces, timelines and identities bearing witness, most often personal, to the encroachment of violence, loss and traumatic events on places and relationships — home, mother, lover, community — that we rely on as our source of safety, while exploring the impact of this on the fine balance between good and poor mental health and how that effects everyday forays into new situations. Whether micro or sustained, Geraldine’s work showcases the power of poetry and art to enter as-yet-uncertain places and breath. - Olive Broderick
About the Author
Geraldine O’Kane is a poet, creative writing facilitator and mental health advocate. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies, journals and zines in Ireland, the UK and the US, as well as appearing in Arlen House’s anthology of new women’s poetry from Ireland, Washing Windows? Irish Women Write Poetry, Her Other Language.
She is one half of Poetry NI, a multimedia platform offering opportunities and resources for poets in Northern Ireland.
Geraldine has given a TED Talk for TEDx Belfast, and read at the Poems Upstairs Series in association with Poetry Ireland. She was recipient of the Artist Career Enhancement Scheme ’15/’16 from Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and one of Eyewear’s Best New British & Irish Poets 2017. Her poems have been listed in the Melita Hume Prize, and Glebe House Harmony Trust poetry competition. She won the NW heat of the 2013 All Ireland Poetry Slam and represented Ulster in the final.
Her micro poetry pamphlet Quick Succession was published by Pen Points Press in 2014.
Geraldine is co-host and regular reader at the Purely Poetry open mic nights in Belfast. She has also curated two multi-platform exhibitions (Poetic Perspective and Product of Perception).
She is currently supported by Arts Council NI, the Big Lottery Fund, and the University of Atypical. She is working towards her second collection and on a YA play set in 90s Northern Ireland.
Media
Excerpt from Unsafe on Salmon Poetry
Interview in the Honest Ulsterman
Praise for Unsafe
As a first collection Unsafe demonstrates the very considerable skills and talents of an up and coming poet who can employ the micro form and more expansive free verse form to equal effect. This poet can handle sensitive narrative, evoke memories, excavate a relationship, intimate the depth of mental pain, make incisive observations, or present the crux of a situation with the economy of a haiku —
The epicentre
of the divorce,
I was their shrapnel. (“While I Remember”)
Most of these poems appear to have grown out of lived experience and close attention, addressing themes such as childhood vulnerability, the fragile balance of relationships, domestic violence, loss and what remains and sustains. What gives these essentially domestic encounters enduring significance is their blend of the particular and the psychological. Geraldine O’Kane brings a concentration of awareness to her carefully weighed and weighted poetry: a distillation that is frank, tender and humane.
Ruth Carr
I started reading Unsafe and found I couldn’t stop. The honesty, the clear-eyed empathy in these poems is compelling. This is a collection of neatly crafted lyrics depicting the messy moments that make us who we are; some are funny, some shocking. All resonate deeply. Unsafe is a generous and haunting debut.
Susan Millar DuMars
“There is warmth and light, darkness and danger in these poems. O’Kane drops anchor into the pedestrian moments of the everyday and creates a unique mosaic of domestic vignettes that often take us by surprise.”
Mel McMahon
Raw and emotive, O’Kane’s work is driven by the power of memory, channelling both nostalgia and melancholy with pinpoint accuracy. These distilled micropoems and lyrically complex lengthier pieces are vivid and ultimately rewarding. A brave and uncompromising debut.
Ross Thompson
Geraldine’s poems tell of memories that are silently screaming, here they have found a voice where she is urgently reporting back as a witness. She speaks of trauma and the resilience that comes over time. She is Hitting to Hurt, I feel in an effort to heal us; she says “This is the room where I last saw you.” and she certainly sees us, she unflinchingly looks to meet your eye and then devastates us with all it means to be utterly human.
Stephen James Smith
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Date Published: September 01, 2021
Paperback, 95 pgs.
ISBN: 9781915022004
