On the Town: Poets, academics and longtime friends gathered to congratulate Peggy O'Brien on the publication of her first poetry collection, Sudden Thaw.
The guests included poet Gerald Dawe, Prof Nicholas Grene and Prof Terence Browne, both of Trinity College Dublin, and Barbara Schmidt, O'Brien's friend since they were classmates in Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where they had studied Anglo-Irish literature.
Another friend was Harriet O'Donovan Sheehy, widow of writer Frank O'Connor (whose real name was Michael O'Donovan), who has known O'Brien since they were both students at Trinity.
"My life has been poetry," explained O'Brien. "This book surrounds the decline of my parents, and their deaths. The first section is about my father and the last is about my mother. The central section at Annaghmakerrig is about me."
The poems "have been brewing and fermenting for a long time", Liam Carson of Lilliput Press, and publisher of the collection, told the gathering. O'Brien has been "engaged with Irish writers at all levels as a student, teacher and scholar" for 40 years, said poet and Ireland Chair of Poetry, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, who was guest speaker at the launch. Poetry is "Peggy's real métier", she said. In Sudden Thaw "there's a whole life lived from cover to cover".
The poet Brendan Kennelly - who was once married to O'Brien - and their daughter, Kirsten Kennelly, both sat proudly at the top of the room to hear O'Brien read from her first collection of poetry.
RTÉ producer Paul Fitzgerald, a former student of O'Brien's in the late 1970s at TCD, recalled her lectures and tutorials as "just electric, superb . . . I learned an awful lot from her".
The writer and New Island editor Anthony Glavin and his wife, Adrienne Fleming, the poet Michael O'Loughlin and Dean of English at TCD and poet, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, all came to applaud O'Brien. Gabriel Rosenstock, who has a new collection of poetry coming out shortly from Coiscéim, called Krishnamurphy ambaist! and the poet Paddy Bushe from Waterville, Co Kerry, whose next book will be titled Nitpicking of Cranes, were also at the launch along with Joseph Woods, director of Poetry Ireland.