Creative Writing students and staff in Carlow College have published a poetry pamphlet drawing inspiration from the war in Ukraine titled Write for Ukraine.

The pamphlet grew out of a recent Poetry Masterclass with Welsh poet Gillian Clarke, held as part of a series of events celebrating the College’s Annual Literary Awards.

Speaking of the project, Lecturer in English & Poet, Dr Derek Coyle said “Gillian felt students needed to register in poetry some response to this terrible event unfolding around us. She encouraged us to think through images, to recall and capture some of the tragic things that we had seen in photographs, on television and online. And then we should try and express what we had seen in simple, yet fresh, language on the page.”

“Gillian felt strongly that the poems should be gathered into a pamphlet as a type of public witness to what was happening in Ukraine and as an act of solidarity with the ordinary people there suffering the horror of war. As you will read, the students saw the war from many different perspectives, all of them important, all of them giving us a distinctive insight into the human situation there.”.

The poetry pamphlet is available to download below: