True Aim

Despite her stature she always saw herself as an Amazon but baulked at the price of amputation just to draw back the bowstring faster. [...]

by Lorna Shaughnessy

Despite her stature
she always saw herself as an Amazon
but baulked at the price of amputation
just to draw back the bowstring faster.

Now the deed was done
would she feel the tension of string against her cheek,
release the arrow from its wounded nest,
observe its flight and fall
far from her quiver full of fears?

Lorna Shaughnessy

Lorna Shaughnessy has published four poetry collections, Torching the Brown River, Witness Trees, Anchored, and Lark Water (Salmon Poetry) as well as a pamphlet, Song of the Forgotten Shulamite (Lapwing). In 2018 she was awarded an Artist’s Bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland and in 2021 an Agility Award to fund the making of short poetry films.

Her monologues on the story of Iphigenia were staged in Cúirt International Literature Festival in 2017, in the Heaney HomePlace in 2018. This was subsequently adapted for video in 2021 and screened in the Winter Warmers Festival Nov 2021.

She lectures in Hispanic Studies in NUI Galway and translates Galician, Spanish and Latin American poetry. With Keith Payne and Martín Veiga, she co-edited the anthology of Irish and Galician ecopoetry, A Different Eden (Dedalus Press 2021).