I’m pleased that my poem “Rust Remembers” appears in the Kilkenny Observer of 2 October 2026, alongside an article about the Thomas Woodgate memorial that inspired it.

During a recent visit to Kilkenny, I stopped at the sculpture outside the courthouse. Its weathered surface and the spaces within its form caught my attention: a memorial whose absences seemed as eloquent as its solid shape.

The poem gives the sculpture a voice, remembering Thomas Woodgate, a fourteen-year-old boy from Callan who died in the sinking of RMS Leinster in 1918. It also reflects on the wider grief surrounding Ireland’s experience of the Great War, and the lives whose remembrance has sometimes been complicated by questions of identity and belonging.

I’m grateful to the memorial committee for their work in keeping Thomas’s story visible, and to the Kilkenny Observer for sharing the poem with its readers. The feature also includes my photograph of the memorial.

Read the feature in the Kilkenny Observer.