Poems and Pictures with Rosamund Taylor

Course Summary

The whole world is your palette,
but only if you reach,
take hold of what you need and pocket it.

-Kurt Schwitters

This is not a course about describing art, but experiencing the ways art works on our imagination. Art doesn’t force us to place ourselves within the bounds of our own lives and lifetimes, but lets us expand our vision outwards. Through this, we can find new ways of examining and embracing the world, in all its immediacy and strangeness.

In this course we will explore the emotional, spiritual and imaginative impact that paintings have on us in order to create new poems with fresh perspectives. A still life painter pays attention to every single aspect of their canvas, from the smallest reflection on a knife, to the dimples on the skin of a lemon: what happens if we find that kind of visual clarity and use it in our own poems? A painter of realism will set a scene, deftly capturing a whole story in one image: can we establish and frame our poems in a similar way? What can we learn from abstraction, from looking at paintings that do not place us in a recognisable time or space? What if we carried that immediacy and freedom to our own work?

This is a chance to experiment, play, and have fun trying new ways of working. As Kurt Schwitters says, we need not be limited by our immediate surroundings, and visual art gives us many tools through which to try new things, see things in new ways, and produce unexpected work.

Course Outline

In the first week, we will begin with still life and representative art, including Pieter Bruegel, Adriaen Coorte, and Pierre Bonnard, and look at poems by W. H. Auden, Mark Doty, and Rainer Maria Rilke. In the second week, we will move on to abstraction, and artists such as Juan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, and poets such as Frank O’Hara, Pascale Petit and Anne Carson.

This course takes place online, and is suitable for all levels who wish to generate new work.

Rosamund Taylor is one of three authors of Reflections Glimmer: Poems Exploring Ekphrasis (Tapsalteerie, 2025), which includes her poems inspired by works of art as diverse as ice age sculpture, George Stubbs’ horse portraits, and Star Trek.

Her debut collection, In Her Jaws (Banshee Press 2022), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection. In 2025, she published Filly (Banshee Press), a novel-in-verse, which was selected as Cork’s One City One Book for 2026.  Her work has been included in anthologies, such as He She They Us (PanMacmillan 2024), Queering the Green (2021), and Windfall: Irish Nature Poems (Hachette 2023). Her individual poems have won The Rialto/RSPB Nature and Place Poetry Prize (2025), The Telegraph Poetry Prize (2023), and The London Magazine Poetry Prize (2020).

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If this course is booked out below please contact bookings@irishwriterscentre.ie to be added to the waiting list