Poet Patrick joins in celebration of hedges

Mullagh poet and memoirist, Patrick Deeley will take centre stage at a new festival being held at Mount Briscoe Organic Farm, Daingean, County Offaly this Saturday and Sunday, September 6 and 7.

Celebrating creativity, wellbeing and Ireland’s hedgerows, the inaugural HedgeRow Fest coincides with National Hedgerow Week 2025. Activities will include yoga, sound baths, readings, forest bathing, foraging and art workshops.

It’s the brainchild of Mount Briscoe’s Margaret Edgill, an organic farmer who has programmed a diverse line-up of writers, conservationists, poets, artists and ecologists. They will explore how hedges are vital habitats, cultural landmarks and sources of inspiration for art, music and storytelling., Patrick will read from his work, including his latest memoir which has the provisional title of Seeing Through Trees.

Nature also features large in his considerable body of poetry. Patrick has had 10 full collections published, the latest being 2024’s Keepsake, which explores love, friendship, art, childhood and ageing. His work has won many awards and been translated into different languages.

In his previous memoir, The Hurley Maker’s Son, which was named for his father, Patrick wrote about his childhood in Mullagh – close to Loughrea – growing up on a farm in the 1950s and ’60s. His current reminiscences also include stories from those days, including meeting a poet for the first time, at the age of 10 – it was the Pulitzer prizewinner Theodore Roethke and it was in Broderick’s Pub in Kilrickle when Patrick and his father, Laurence, called in for a drink on their way home from cutting timber in Woodlawn. The lauded American poet didn’t make a particularly great impression on Patrick, a lad “with a hot temper”. He describes this in the book, which he says “is funny but also lyrical”.

Patrick also shares his experiences of moving to Dublin as a young man and about his day job for 36 years, first as a teacher and then principal at the De La Salle primary school in Ballyfermot.

Again, humour is prominent but he also talks about how all who were involved in teaching pupils from a deprived area, worked to give them a rounded education and how the school developed excellent facilities for sports and extra-curricular activities.

It also supported their parents, especially the mothers, “many of whom would have been stay-at-home parents”.

The school made space available so that local women who had left education early and wanted to return, could attend classes at night to study for the Inter/Junior Cert and Leaving Cert.

The closure of the school in 2019, due to falling numbers, remains a source of regret to Patrick, even though he had retired in 2012.

His memoir also includes musings on his poetry and on other poets such as Seamus Heaney and Paul Durcan whom he met along the way, through his voluntary involvement with the organisation Poetry Ireland in the 1980s.

Patrick worked in primary education for 36 years, as teacher and later a principal, and he loved it.

At night, he had a second job – as a writer.

He has been a published poet for 50 years and is grateful to people like the late poet Eavan Boland and late literary editor David Marcus, who published his youthful work in the pages of the Irish Times and the Irish Press.

The working title of Patrick’s memoir, Walking in Trees, reflects his love of nature and the effect trees have on him, which is to quieten his mind and body.

Pictured: Patrick Deeley is taking part in the inaugural HedgeRow Festival in Daingean, Offaly, this Sunday.