Poetry & Music
Join us in Townley Hall’s stunning library for an intimate gathering weaving poetry and music. Cork-based poet Jennifer Horgan will read from her debut collection Care, published by Doire Press, interwoven with songs performed by BMF Young Artists Èlia Farreras and Lucas Huber.
Through her work born of personal experience and characterised by arresting imagery, Horgan calls on us to reconcile and to unite—to care. This is a hopeful collection, intent on championing the goodness in people, deftly highlighting our propensity towards kindness and away from hate. Care is a hand stretched across whatever it is that divides us, extended with a delicacy of spirit and unwavering hope.
Praise for Care
“Jennifer Horgan’s poems land like magnetic mantras. She questions what it is to be human, in all its doubt, all its beauty. Her words beat with a fierce tenderness toward humanity as she fixes her gaze on her, him, them, us, and ‘for what can bring us back together again’.”
“Raw, intricate, immediate, actual, Jenny Horgan’s voice is uncompromising. She sees life and the world through a broken lens that splits the false light from the true and leaves us basking in – or hiding from – the brilliance of the colours we never saw before.”
JENNIFER HORGAN was awarded a mentorship with Thomas McCarthy in 2023 through the Munster Literature Centre. She was shortlisted in the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Poetry Prize in 2023. In November 2024 she read as part of O’Bhéal’s International Winter Warmer poetry festival. A secondary English teacher by profession, Jennifer wrote for some years as The Irish Examiner’s Secret Teacher. In 2021, she released her non-fiction book O Captain My Captain: One Teacher’s Hope for Change in the Irish Education System, with Orpen Press. She has written on education for The Irish Times and The Guardian also. A regular contributor to local and national radio, she also writes local features for the Echo and a weekly column for The Irish Examiner.