Madeleine D'Arcy
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October 27th, 2014

10/27/2014

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Derry O’Sullivan, an Irish language poet, was born in Bantry, Co Cork in 1944 and now lives in Paris. His poem, Stillborn 1943: Calling Limbo, which you can read below, is heart-breaking and beautifully written.  Those of you who know me well will be aware that my outrage about Limbo was one of the reasons why I became an agnostic at age 12. My sincere thanks to Doireann Ní Ghríofa for sharing this poem with me after a wonderful chat we had in RTE Studio Cork on Thursday 11 September 2014.

Stillborn 1943: Calling Limbo
(for Nuala McCarthy)


You were born dead 
and your blue limbs were folded
on the living bier of your mother
the umbilical cord unbroken between you
like an out-of-service phone line.
The priest said it was too late
for the blessed baptismal water
that arose from Lough Bofinne
and cleansed the elect of Bantry.
So you were cut from her
and wrapped, unwashed,
in a copy of The Southern Star,
a headline about the War across your mouth.
An orange box would serve as coffin
and, as requiem, your mother listened
to hammering out in the hallway,
and the nurse saying to her
that you'd make Limbo without any trouble.
Out of the Mercy Hospital
the gardener carried you under his arm
with barking of dogs for a funeral oration
to a nettle-covered field
that they still call the little churchyard.

You were buried there
without cross or prayer
your grave a shallow hole;
one of a thousand without names
with only the hungry dogs for visitors.
Today, forty years on
I read in The Southern Star –
theologians have stopped believing
in Limbo. 

But I'm telling you, little brother
whose eyes never opened
that I've stopped believing in them.
For Limbo is as real as Lough Bofinne:
Limbo is the place your mother never left,
where her thoughts lash her like nettles
and The Southern Star in her lap is an unread breviary;
where she strains to hear the names of nameless children
in the barking of dogs, each and every afternoon.


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    Author

    Madeleine D’Arcy was born in Ireland and later spent thirteen years in the UK. She worked as a criminal legal aid solicitor and as a legal editor in London before returning to Cork City in 1999 with her husband and son. She began to write fiction in 2005.

     Madeleine’s début collection of short fiction, Waiting For The Bullet (Doire Press, 2014) won the Edge Hill Readers’ Choice Prize 2015 (UK).

     In 2010 she received a Hennessy X.O Literary Award for First Fiction as well as the overall Hennessy X.O Literary Award for New Irish Writer.

     Her work has been short-listed and commended in many other competitions.

     Publication credits include: Sunday Tribune; Made in Heaven and Other Short Stories; Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press); Irish Examiner; Necessary Fiction; Irish Independent; Irish Times; The Penny Dreadful; Long Story Short; Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts; Short Story (University of Texas, Brownsville, Vols 20.2, 21.2); Unbraiding the Short Story (Ed. Maurice A Lee); Surge: New Writing From Ireland (O’Brien Press, 2014) and Quarryman (UCC/Bradshaw Books, 2014), and Headstuff.org (10 July 2015).

     New stories are forthcoming in The Elysian Anthology and Edge Hill Press Anthology 2016.

    Her work has also featured on RTE Radio programmes Arena and Sunday Miscellany.

    Madeleine was a scholarship student on the inaugural MA in Creative Writing in UCC from 2013-2014 and obtained First Class Honours.

    A short film of her story ‘Dog Pound’, featuring the distinguished Irish actor Frank Kelly, was premièred at the Hennessy Literary Awards in April 2014 and can be viewed on Youtube: 
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSl3orufxqE


    She ran Probys Quay Writers’ Workshop from 2009-2011. She has facilitated workshops at West Cork Literary Festival 2014, Doolin Writers’ Weekend 2015 and in Cork City. She is currently writing a novel.

    You can contact Madeleine at madeleinedarcy@eircom.net or via Facebook, where her account is Madeleine D’Arcy Lane, and she will get back to you as soon as possible.




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