On the Margins

Abstract

These poems reflect on different stages of girlhood and womanhood. In the first, 'Sarah Cecilia Harrison, Self-Portrait, 1889,' the speaker observes her daughter, and recalls an image of an Irish artist from the turn of the last century; 'The Eight Amendment, 1982, captures the impact of a referendom on a friendship in the early 1980's in Ireland; 'Conversations' evokes a childhood friendship between two girls; and a contemporary teenage girl is dramatised in 'Venus on Sandymount Green'.