Angela Graham - Issue 34

Angela Graham is from Belfast. Culture And Democracy Press published her poetry collection, Star in 2024 and next year will bring out Exposure, 75 poems on media and war. Seren Books published her 2022 poetry collection, Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere, and her short story collection, A City Burning, 2020 which was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize.

She was a finalist in this year's Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. She won the Poetry Prize in the inaugural Linen Hall Ulster-Scots Writing Competition, 2021 and is featured in the 2025 BBC NI documentary Out of the Silence. She is a commissioned poet in this year's Linen Hall Library Fragments of Scotch Poetry project with Poetry Jukebox.

Her journalism, reviewing and critical writing has appeared in The Irish Times, The Cardiff Review, The Honest Ulsterman and elsewhere. She guest-edits the Arts section of Fortnight magazine. She judged the TRIO Uganda poetry competition, 2024. She is an award-winning producer in tv and feature film.  a Foreign-language Oscars-entrant as producer and screenwriter and a BAFTA Cymru winner and nominee as screenwriter and producer.

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By Ordinary Means

On the last day of the heatwave

we took the boat to Rathlin,

spent the afternoon soaking up sun

alongside the seals on the foreshore.

Silence

gifted itself like a miracle.

The great ocean’s impetus slowed

to sighs of contentment,

each one appearing just as a right-to-left

running-stitch on the very hem of the sea;

a quicksilver script with tidings

of un-fathomed, marvellous bounty

and I thought of the painting

where the Archangel Gabriel

– elbows cocked, gorgeous wings

framing his rayonnant halo – 

offers the Virgin

God’s breath through a mouth organ’s lungs.

Prompted by the painting, Annunciation With Mouth Organ by Kevin Sinnott