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Displaying items by tag: Poetry Day

To mark Poetry Day Ireland tomorrow (Thursday 30 April), the Marine Institute is sharing a selection of poems that celebrate the power of our seas and oceans.

The State agency for marine research will join Poetry Ireland’s annual celebration of poetry, which this year is taking place online all over the island of Ireland.

“It’s wonderful that the Marine Institute is taking part, as the marine world has long been a subject of fierce fascination for poets,” said Lisa Jewell of Poetry Ireland.

“By sharing poems online during Poetry Day Ireland, the institute is helping to bring people together through poetry and deepen their appreciation of our ocean.”

The Marine Institute will share poems from well-known poets such as Ireland’s beloved Seamus Heaney, and American poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

Dickinson often wrote about the sea but it’s believed she did so from her imagination, having never actually visited the ocean.

Other writers who have been captured by the sea’s imagery include famous children’s author Lewis Carroll, and Irish poet and much-loved former TV presenter Pat Ingoldsby.

Poet Robin McNamara, living in Waterford city, has also kindly shared his poem ‘The Fisherman’, about the sacrifice and dangers faced by fishermen who fish the seas off Dunmore East, Co Waterford.

Poems inspired by the sea are already being shared each day on the Marine Institute’s social media channels — Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — which will continue until this Saturday 2 May.

The poems will also be available for download on the Marine Institute’s website.

Published in News Update

Coastal Notes Coastal Notes covers a broad spectrum of stories, events and developments in which some can be quirky and local in nature, while other stories are of national importance and are on-going, but whatever they are about, they need to be told.

Stories can be diverse and they can be influential, albeit some are more subtle than others in nature, while other events can be immediately felt. No more so felt, is firstly to those living along the coastal rim and rural isolated communities. Here the impact poses is increased to those directly linked with the sea, where daily lives are made from earning an income ashore and within coastal waters.

The topics in Coastal Notes can also be about the rare finding of sea-life creatures, a historic shipwreck lost to the passage of time and which has yet many a secret to tell. A trawler's net caught hauling more than fish but cannon balls dating to the Napoleonic era.

Also focusing the attention of Coastal Notes, are the maritime museums which are of national importance to maintaining access and knowledge of historical exhibits for future generations.

Equally to keep an eye on the present day, with activities of existing and planned projects in the pipeline from the wind and wave renewables sector and those of the energy exploration industry.

In addition Coastal Notes has many more angles to cover, be it the weekend boat leisure user taking a sedate cruise off a long straight beach on the coast beach and making a friend with a feathered companion along the way.

In complete contrast is to those who harvest the sea, using small boats based in harbours where infrastructure and safety poses an issue, before they set off to ply their trade at the foot of our highest sea cliffs along the rugged wild western seaboard.

It's all there, as Coastal Notes tells the stories that are arguably as varied to the environment from which they came from and indeed which shape people's interaction with the surrounding environment that is the natural world and our relationship with the sea.