Ivy Ireland – November 8 2020

World Science Day for Peace and Development – November 11

Ivy is an award-winning poet who owns a second-hand bookstore café and lectures part-time in creative writing at the University of Newcastle, where she gained her PhD in 2012. She has worked as a cabaret performer, magician’s assistant, tap dancer and harpist, performing at various festivals and events such as This Is Not Art, The Big Day Out, the Canberra Folk Festival and The Peats Ridge Festival. Ivy has a penchant for mysticism and cosmology and her poetry displays a characteristic, quasi-scientific humour. Ivy’s literary awards include the Australian Young Poet Fellowship, the Harri Jones Memorial Prize, the Thunderbolt Prize and the Newcastle Poetry Prize local award. Her poem ‘Velocity’ also won the inaugural Pigeon Poetry championship, courtesy of Jimbala, the pigeon who carried it in the 20km race along the NSW South Coast to determine the fastest verse in the nation. Ivy’s poems, reviews and essays have been published in various anthologies and journals including Cordite, Overland, Mascara, Going Down Swinging and Plumwood Mountain and she has a poem on permanent display in the Bletchley Park Museum, Milton Keynes, UK.

Incidental Complications
The Poets Union, 2007; ISBN 9780957856493
“The poems in Ivy Ireland’s debut collection, Incidental Complications, are infused with an awareness and knowledge of contemporary of science, cosmology and ancient mysticism. Through these prisms her poetry investigates what it means to be a human in a 21st-century universe; and explores relationship to oneself and one’s body, as well as the nature of intimate relationships with others. Ivy Ireland writes with poise, depth, grit and vision, negotiating the shifts between the scientific abstract and the subjective vernacular in her rhetoric. While there is a strong sense of gravity in her poems, her distinctive poetic discourse displays some levitational charm.” – Joanne Burns

Porch Light
Puncher and Wattmann, 2014; ISBN 9781922186713
“In the poem ‘Nuclear’, after stating ‘… Nothing is ever obvious or contained’, Ivy Ireland asks, ‘How can I write / a lyric poem about the micro-needle in the gargantuan multiverse?’ Yet, in a book replete with angels, devils, evolutionary theory, astro-physics, mythology, magpie song, winter flowers, ghost gums, strangler figs, human love and human fear, this is what she does. Never obvious or contained, Porch Light is its own multi-verse of ideas, speculations and puzzlements. It swings from abstract terminology to idiomatic vigour, from doubt to joy, from mind to body. This is exciting writing, exciting reading.” – Brook Emery