Book Launch: Dwelling by Máighréad Medbh

Join Macha Press to celebrate the publication of Dwelling, with a reading by the poet, and a physical improvisation performance by movement artists, Anatolii Liaskolo and Joan Somers Donnelly.

Dwelling is a work of excavation: lyrical, archival, and embodied. At its centre is Kate, Máighréad Medbh’s great grandmother, likely the subject of eviction during the clearances after the Irish Famine: a figure both spectral and grounding. From her displacement unfolds a meditation on ownership and loss, on land and energy, on how memory itself is harvested and converted into power.

This hybrid text moves between poem, essay, and fieldwork, where turbines rise like white demigods over ancestral patches of ground, and wind is an agent of both inheritance and erasure. Through acts of walking, reading, and reimagining, the author explores how stories and the human trace are preserved — and who preserves them — in a landscape forever rewritten by industry, weather, and the vagaries of history. Dwelling asks: what does it mean to belong to land that no longer remembers you — or that you no longer recognize?

Máighréad Medbh is a poet with nine published books and a reputation for compelling performance. Since her debut with Blackstaff Press in 1990, she has performed widely in Ireland, Europe, the UK and US. Her poetic narrative of the Irish famine, Tenant, was initially published online and subsequently as a print book (Salmon, 1999). She works mostly in long-form sequences or conceptual explorations, and her ecological verse novel, Parvit of Agelast (Arlen House, 2016), was shortlisted for the 2017 Pigott Prize. She has an MA in Poetry Studies and a creative-critical PhD in Experimental Literature from Dublin City University.

Macha Press is supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, and the Shared Island Civic Society Fund, managed by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Government of Ireland.