Victoria Kennefick's debut poetry collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2022 and was awarded the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year 2022. Most recently, it has been shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2022. In 2021, it was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Book Award. It was a book of the year in The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Telegraph, The Sunday Independent and The White Review. Her pamphlet, White Whale (Southword Editions, 2015), won the Munster Literature Centre’s Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition and the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Victoria is the current poet-in-residence at the Yeats Society Sligo.
This week's Southword poem is 'My Eyes' by Dermot Bolger, which appears in issue 41. You can buy single issues, subscribe, or find out how to submit to Southword here.