Patricia Burke Brogan, Irish playwright, novelist, poet and artist.
After moving to Galway from County Clare aged two, Patricia Burke Brogan grew up surrounded by books and music. She divides her time between her writing and visual art. It was Patricia’s first play, Eclipsed that would mark the start of an illustrious career.
Eclipsed was one of the first plays to tell the story of the Magdalene Laundries and was inspired by Patricia’s experiences as a young novitiate. After seeing the horrendous goings on, Patricia decided that becoming a nun was not for her. Instead she decided to highlight the plight of these women in her writing.
The play has since won many awards, including a Fringe First at Edinburgh Theatre Festival in 1992, and the USA Moss Hart Award in 1994. To date, there have been more than 100 productions of Eclipsed on three continents, but the controversial work was not always so well received, being initially rejected by all of the main theatre companies, who said it was too controversial. Burke Brogan has continued to write two more plays, Requiem of Love and Stained Glass at Samhain (2002), and has also released a number of poetry collections. Her latest work, Décollage New and Selected Poems, was launched in October 2008 at the Galway City Museum.
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Etched Torso
‘To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail.’ Beckett
In the acid bath
a copper plate
grows dull in turquoise bubbles.
Fumes sway up
from skull thorn-pierced,
shattered shoulder,
torn ribspace.
Acid washed away
in clear water,
she places the etched plate
on a wire-meshed stove.
Gauze-masked, she watches
incense of melting resin rise
above mounds of ink
on double-imaged glass shelves.
Orient Blue, terracotta,
crimson alizarin,
warm sepia, cerulean.
Incense soars above rows
of glimmering etched plates,
above tins with strange messages,
Laurence of Bleeding Heart Yard.
Charbonnel, Quai Montebello, Paris.
Urbino, Via Sasso, Italia.
Unprotected by opaque bitumen
in the acid-bath of resin bubbles,
the etched torso darkens.
Dies.
Grappling with a vision,
she takes a burin and cuts
thin ribbons from tawny metal flesh.
From bundles of soft-textured paper
Fabriano, Arches, Saunders,
she chooses an ivory sheet.
The printing-press shrieks
as, pushed between huge cylinder
and bed of the press,
forced between etched lines
and open-bite spaces,
the soft clamp paper
takes an inked-up relief.
Disappointed,
she pins the failed image
on a drying line.
Leaving the workshop’s
dull glow of copper, neutral of zinc,
she walks out into rain.
A gauzed sky reflects on tarmac.
Between brimming sycamores,
arrows and double yellow lines
are tattoos soft on soft skin of earth.
As she walks through water,
through double-imaged clouds,
she finds a Coke tin
distorted by heavy wheels.
A bruised tin man
hangs between earth and sky.
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Make Visible the Tree
This is the Place of Betrayal.
Roll back the stones
behind Madonna blue walls.
Make visible the tree.
Above percussion of engines
from gloom of catacombs,
through a glaze of prayer,
scumble of chanting,
make visible the tree,
its branches ragged
with washed-out linens
of bleached shroud.
In this shattered landscape,
sharpened tongues
of sulphur-yellow bulldozers
slice through wombs
of blood-soaked generations.
This is the place,
where Veronica,
forsaken,
stares and stares
at a blank towel.
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Exiles
The remember mountain shapes,
bony masses hulking
from black-umber bogs.
They remember lilac shadows
moving across bulked rock.
Crushed between skyscrapers,
baked in underground carriages,
deafened in discos,
they remember skyu-lakes
rough with tears.
They remember
pappery incense
of saffron fruze.
Viridian thorns wrap
granite and limestone,
where haloes wild with colour
dissolve over Maam valley.
Fossiled and transformed
in the ring-round of life,
ancestors’ clay,
their own clay calls to them.
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The Galway Review 