(Poetry Chapbook) Dinner in the Fields by Attracta Fahy 
46 pages 
 
On Dinner in the Fields:
 
“Attracta Fahy is seer and chronicler, not of history as we’ve been taught it, but of a past speckled with folk memory; she is a seer into hearts, into the sensuous rush that sometimes defines what being human means. This is sensitive, reflective work, rooted in a vision that is both beautiful and existential.” 
Mary O’Donnell, Maynooth
“True poetry of the soul. Whether we read them in solitude or hear them spoken they give us a sense of our connectedness to the universe, to nature, and to each other.” 
Máirín Ní Nualláin Psychiatrist and Analytical Psychologist
“If these emotionally raw poems don’t make you sit up and listen you should perhaps go to doctor to check if you’re still alive.” 
Kevin Higgins 
 
Extract:
 
 
The Woman in Waterside House
 
I have no reason to trust sympathy,
when I tell you I hid for thirteen
days, waiting for marks to disappear.
I’m asked if I provoked him:
the guards call the beating,
‘a domestic’,
 
social workers, and welfare, 
insist boxes be ticked.
Slight disgust in their faces. 
‘Even so, when you’re leaving,
look for maintenance’
and then the forms, and forms,
and the council informs me
the waiting list is years long.
 
And the judge doesn’t want to know, 
“Perpetrators”, he says, “have rights.” 
He convinced me
that I cannot live without him,
I am nothing and no one cares. 
 
I’m alone.
I cannot leave. 
Easier to pretend my life 
is full, than to face the shame 
in your eyes, mine,
and the shame of the world, 
when you are a woman with a fist over your face.