Guest Feature -Eilín de Paor and Damien B Donnelly – In Poetry Conversation

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Congratulations to Eilín de Paor and Damien B Donnelly on the publication of their poetry conversation In the Jitterfritz of Neon published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press. Don’t you just love that cover?

Something a little different today on Patricia’s Pen, in so much as rather than have one guest poet, I have two. Co-authors, Eilín de Paor and Damien B Donnelly, of In the Jitterfritz of Neon have come along to chat about their new release. Firstly, without further ado, it’s over to Eilín.

Jitterfritz of Neon

Eilín de Paor and Damien B Donnelly

From Eilín

In the Jitterfritz of Neon is a conversation in poetry, sparked by stories shared between Damien and myself, over a number of in-person and Zoom catch-ups during 2020/1. We met for the first time at a poetry event in 2019, so ours is a fairly new friendship. As we got to know each other, though, we soon discovered that, even though our lives to date have been quite different, we share a lot of interests and a compatible world view.

One of the things we found we had in common was how much we both really miss socialising as it was before the pandemic – the adventure of the unplanned and unscheduled. The theme for this pamphlet grew organically out of those conversations. Of course, the fact that Mark Davidson from The Hedgehog Poetry Press announced a pamphlet competition specifically looking for conversations gave us the impetus we needed to turn our germ of an idea into words on a page. We are very grateful to him for the nudge.

Damien and I had such fun writing these poems. We look forward to sharing them and hope some of the joy their writing brought to us will chime with others.

From Damien B Donnelly

Covid brought every past night out that we’d ever experienced down on top of our distanced solitude. Lights of dancefloors that had been packed tightly away in a box labelled ‘dump’ suddenly found themselves opened up and turned on again, in the middle on an empty living room demanding recognition.

The joy of swapping these memories with Eilín and being inspired to find ones that related was such an organic process and was really a lovely, honest way of getting to know a new friend. I think identity has a deep place in the memory and when we share, we show parts of who we are, who we were and who we want to become without actually knowing it. I think we both know so much more about each other now, more than we would have found out pre-pandemic.

This is a journey we will look back on and be proud of what we achieved together, in a time that asked us to stay apart.