I don’t know what it is about Northern Ireland culture that results in the creation of so many talented poets. However, it’s my pleasure to introduce yet another, Katy Mahon, to reflect on a poem from her pamphlet Some Indefinable Cord, (Hybriddreich, 2022).

Memory as a form of seeing

Despite claiming in ‘Dust and Order’, the opening poem in my debut chapbook, that I don’t do elegies/ nor inwardly lament the passing of being/ from skin and bone to earth again, many of the poems in ‘Some Indefinable Cord’ contain an elegiac, mourning quality. This would be a nod to myself as musician, if it weren’t for the fact that it was subconsciously done. However, my chapbook title is a purposeful play on the homophones ‘cord’ and ‘chord’, and indeed, either could have worked. In the end I chose ‘cord’ as the essential element of the collection was…