Overview

For the 180th anniversary of An Gorta Mór's commencement, Seang (Hungering) poignantly reclaims the human story behind the lost history of a group of rebel girls who were daughters of refugees from Ireland's Great Famine. It seeks to restore voice to these girls and their families, who were silenced over and over during their lives, and who suffered destitution, discrimination, and intergenerational incarceration and hardships largely driven by colonial policies, attitudes and actions in Ireland and in their country of refuge, Australia. Incorporating award-winning research and poetry, Seang offers a beacon for the 473 million children in our world today who are impacted by conflict and extreme food insecurity driven by the same three factors--climate, politics and economics. ""Seang is a work that reaches deeply into human suffering and trauma. Anne Casey's material is harrowing, yet through compassion, through risk-taking, and the dazzling spell of poetry, this book brings us face-to-face with what we should never turn away from: the sinister effects of colonialism and the power structures that destabilise our abilities to act humanely. With these poems, Anne Casey brings dignity to those who have been brutalized and forgotten. The many layers in this book build to epic proportions, its rhythms and interrogations create unforgettable power. Seang reminds us that poetry expresses thought and feeling more lastingly than anything else."" --Judith Beveridge Poet, editor, academic, Prime Minister's Poetry Prize winner ""Anne Casey's Seang (Hungering) is an elegant, multifaceted meditation on the privations meted out to the daughters of Irish famine immigrants to Australia, moving beyond the historical record to explore hunger as both a physical condition and a metaphysical punishment, inseparable in many cases from the condition of womanhood. Casey's poised, lyrical poems are grounded in the body as the site of originary appetites and suffering, but also attuned to the spiritual hungers generated by separation from language, culture, place and family. Formally and tonally various, moving between the historical and the imagined, the known and the unknowable, Seang (Hungering) offers a searing archive of the female experience that is shot through everywhere with Casey's sensitivity to the image, line and music. What impresses most is Casey's sense of voice: by turns epistolary, documentary, confessional, rebellious and ardent, these poems speak to us across time and space, demanding and commanding our attention."" --Professor Sarah Holland-Batt Poet, academic, Prime Minister's Literary Award winner ""At the heart of Seang, Anne Casey's searing new collection are journeys. This work, a rich, polyvocal, intertextual, and lyric documentary, calls to mind John Montague's The Dead Kingdom and Michael Coady's All Souls, both classic explorations of the Irish Diaspora. Seang is underlined by forced journeys endured by women and girls from Ireland to Australia in the wake of the Great Hunger, and by their subsequent journeys within New South Wales as they sought to gain footholds in an often hostile and inhospitable land. Aided by groundbreaking research and great literary skill, Anne Casey brings to vibrant life the experiences and desires of Eliza O'Brien (1851-1876), whose family hailed from Shanagolden in Co. Limerick, and of the many others who suffered in Australian industrial schools and prisons and who, until now, were silent. Seang is a furious, graceful, and deeply moving work of literary witness."" --Professor Eamonn Wall Poet, academic, Smurfit-Stone Professor of Irish Studies, University of Missouri-St Louis

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9781915022899

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Originally from west Clare in Ireland, and living in Sydney, Australia, Anne Casey is an award-winning poet and writer, and author of two previous, critically acclaimed poetry collections--where the lost things go (Salmon Poetry, 2017) and out of emptied cups (Salmon Poetry, 2019). She has worked for 30 years as a journalist, magazine editor, media communications director and legal author. Senior Poetry Editor of Other Terrain and Backstory literary journals (Swinburne University, Melbourne) from 2017-2020, she serves on numerous literary advisory boards. Anne's writing and poetry are widely published internationally and rank in The Irish Times newspaper's Most-Read. She has won/shortlisted for poetry prizes in Ireland, Northern Ireland, the USA, the UK, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia. Anne passionately believes that every poem, like all art, should leave us changed by the experience. Her poems feature internationally in newspapers, magazines, journals, anthologies, broadcasts, podcasts, music albums, stage shows and art exhibitions. She holds a Law Degree from University College Dublin and qualifications in Media Communications from Dublin Institute of Technology (Technological University Dublin). She is the recipient of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship for her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney. Website: anne-casey.com Social Media: @1annecasey

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