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STEPHANIE CONN is a poet, creative writing facilitator, poetry mentor and former primary school teacher and literacy co-ordinator. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the Seamus Heaney Centre, QUB, and holds a PhD by Practice: Poetry from Ulster University. Her research explores the poetry of chronic illness. Stephanie is the author of Island (Doire Press, 2018), The Woman on the Other Side (Doire Press, 2016), Copeland’s Daughter (Smith/Doorstep, 2016) and most recently, off-kilter (Doire Press, 2022). Her prizes include the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing and the Yeovil Poetry Prize. The Woman on the Other Side was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award for Best First Collection and Copeland’s daughter won the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition. She is the recipient of arts awards, bursaries and residencies, and has read her work locally, nationally and internationally. Stephanie will be one of the 2023 resident artists at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris.
Shortlisted for the 2016 Shine / Strong Award
In novel ways, Stephanie Conn lays bare tensions between the domestic and the sexual, the natural and the supernatural from a fiercely feminine perspective which is both shocking and exaggerated, yet clear and convincing.
— Medbh McGuckian
The First Lighthouse
Cross Island, 1714
Even then, the flaming beacon was old-fashioned;
lensed lamps had been available for years, yet
an open-fire blazed on top of the white-washed tower;
three storeys of island-quarried stone, picked
and carried on the convicts’ backs.
They built the walls two metres thick.
These twenty acres never did attract the sun;
there was no call for a mirror to catch the light;
Alexandria’s blue skies were little more than fables.
The people here had no time for sea-gods
who shepherd seals or speak of the past or future;
in these parts, that is better left unsaid.
This land lies three miles from the Lough’s mouth,
knows nothing of the Nile’s flat plains or
the limestone pharos, reinforced with molten lead.
But yes, the fires burned alike. An iron spindle,
twenty metres up, revolved beneath the brazier;
the hot coals kept burning by the keeper —
a ton and a half on a windy night;
the old donkey lugging the black stuff
up the hill from the moonlit beach.
Walled Garden
To live on a small patch of flat land,
in the middle of the sea, you need defences.
If herbs and fruit trees are to grow,
if you want chicken flavoured with rosemary
or poached pears and blackberries,
you must build four walls, raise the temperature
by degrees, to coax saplings to the sky.
The stone absorbs what little heat the sun gives,
prevents frost forming on fuchsia
flowered currants and salt-laden iced winds
from battering the swelling fruit.
There is nothing ornamental about this square
of stone built so close to waves
churning up porcelain and flakes of skin.
Under the Skin
There is nothing to see here.
No dislodged bumper battered out of shape,
no shattered windscreen, spray of glass.
There are no body parts, no twisted limbs,
not even blood. The road is dry and clean.
No-one is pacing with a phone or crying.
No-one is taking notes, taking pictures, taking care.
No-one is measuring distance. There is no recovery truck.
The single line of traffic has barely slowed.
There is nothing to see here.
Just a patch of coned-off tarmac
where the cars collided.
The Accident
One block south-west from the centre of the universe,
a young couple hurry off a bus to look for her small umbrella
in the square. Empty-handed they board another bus,
Xochimilco bound. She sits by the handrail, reminds herself
of the chocolate and the beautiful new bolero she still has.
Besides, it doesn’t look like rain and the sun has lowered
in the sky. Its angle stretches light across an old man’s glowing
fingertips, nipping the neck of a brown paper package.
The impact can’t have been gentle or silent, leaving her
naked and bloodied, as it did, her body impaled on the rail,
her foot crushed to pulp, her leg fractured in eleven places.
Time did seem to stop, to gather gold dust in a sacred cloud
above her sticky skin, before it cloaked her, making her art,
in the moment before the sirens, screams, cutting, pain.
ISBN: 978-1-907682-87-2 | Pages: 104 | Published: 2022
Off-Kilter sees the environment and the body under pressure—the landscape burns, the body sickens, relationships fracture. Threat looms large, yet these poems also chart a tentative path through the darkness. These are poems of people and place, crisis and pain, but also of hope.
ISBN: 978-1907682-61-2 | Pages: 80 | Published: 2018
Island takes its inspiration from the poet’s ancestors, who lived their lives, farming and fishing on Copeland Island off the County Down coast. It was a hard, demanding life often defined by the weather and the sea. These are poems of place but also of people and of human reaction and interaction. The work moves beyond the confines of this one small island to Ischia, Rough Island, Skellig Michael, to a vivid present and towards a future informed by a discovered history. This is a book of island dwellers; those longing to escape or hoping to belong, those in search of answers or solitude, those who want to hide the truth and those who want to uncover it.
ISBN: 978-1-907682-42-1 | Pages: 80 | Published: 2016
The Woman on the Other Side is a book of exploration. The poetry invites the readers into a world of fragments, between physical and internal landscapes. The collection is set in various locations and timelines, beginning from the opening passages inspired by the Dutch countryside and drawing a subsequent inspiration from its historic painters. However, Conn manages to superimpose her own vision and interpretation onto the paintings and leaves her written version lingering distinctly, like a melodious mid-note hanging unobtrusive, in some corner of the readers mind (reviewed by Syed Shehzar M Doja, The Luxembourg Review).
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Doire is the Irish word for oak grove, translating into English as Derry.