Cover Quotations

There’s extraordinary recall here and a wide-ranging, absorbing eloquence, an aliveness in the telling, a resilience. It’s as if the act of writing both brings back the past and lays it to some kind of rest… In the end, the book asks what we all might do with our history and whether we are doomed to repeat ourselves or is there, in the act of re-writing, a process by which we lead ourselves and each other to a greater understanding.

– Greta Stoddart, Cholmondeley Award 2023

A Wide River Divides Us is an extraordinary mixture of a collection. Witness statement, Proustian evocation of the sweetness of what’s half-remembered, rueful conversations with the poet’s own self: together these create a unique portrait of the artist as a survivor of troubled times.

– Fiona Sampson, MBE FRSL

The opening poems in A Wide River Divides Us are rooted in memory and in a very particular time and location: Derry/Londonderry in the 1970s. Then, as we move further into the collection, the poet takes us out of time and into more fluid, unanchored places, where the poems reflect how the past and its traumas leak into the present and inform the construction of self. A powerful debut.

– Moyra Donaldson, Arts Council of Northern Ireland Major Artist 

Poems full of heart, humour and even-handedness.

– Cat Brogan, Poet and Community Worker in Northern Ireland