Where I'm From

By Sheila Fitzpatrick O'Donnell

This book is much more than a snippet of a poet’s memoir, as exemplified in the title poem, wherein the poet explores the Limerick of a church-ruled childhood with its rebel adolescence and detail of place; followed by poems of protest, social injustice, homage and the poet’s enlightenment in the God Pod of Glenstal and Shanagolden. The book is further strengthened with the excellent, Indigio Child, The Night Shift, Who Do I Think I Am and her legacy My Gift To You, which augurs well for a sequel from the pen of this most confessional and honest of voices. – John Liddy

• Language: English
• Publisher: Limerick Writers Centre
• Release date: Jun 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215214251

Sheila Fitzpatrick O'Donnell

Sheila Fitzpatrick O'Donnell is a native of Limerick City, now living in Shanagolden, Co Limerick. She comes from a long line of poets/storytellers; her mother, known as Polly the Poet, encouraged her to pick up the pen. Her work has been published in many anthologies in Ireland and abroad.Sheila won the Desmond O'Grady Limerick verse competition in 2009. She also won the All Ireland Limericks competition 2009 and 2011 and the Cuisle International Poetry Competition in 2013. She was shortlisted for the Desmond O'Grady Poetry Competition in 2013. Her first collection, A Bouquet of Trilogies, was published in 2010. In 2014 Sheila and Bridget Wallace took the Poetry Chair project to the streets for Limerick City of Culture.

Book preview

Where I’m from is a book of poems in memoir form. The adventures captured in the writing is how I experienced them. You will come across a small few colourful ‘words’ in some of the poems in this collection, seeing as I have poetic licence I have chosen to use the lingo of my youth…

I have very fond memories outside of school with my pals growing up back in the seventies, I do not come from the posh side of Limerick City – nor did I ever wish to! I wouldn’t change anything about where I’m from, it is the people and place that has kept me well grounded, and has made me the strong-willed woman I am today.

Now that I am retired from work, and have so much free time on my hands, I am having great fun writing about my life’s experience and at the same time a little sad too…

The title of this book came from the prompt which the Kentucky poet George Ella Lyon gave… ‘where I’m from’

Delve into the pages and enjoy!

– Sheila Fitzpatrick O’Donnell.

Introduction

If you have never met the author of this exhilarating collection of poems that will rock you, then you are missing out! But don’t worry you are about to meet her head on, as she was and as she is between the covers of this book because here you’ll find her without fear or favour, ina steill bheatha – as large as life:

‘Cartwheeling along the high grass in the yellow butter cupped field,

rolling with laughter down the bumpy grassy hill’

From the outset let’s be clear about one thing. We are dealing with a self-avowed ‘tomboy, a free-spirited wild child’ and of course if according to Wordsworth, and Sheila can wax lyrical like him at times, ‘the child is father of the man’ then surely he can be father of the woman no less. We are blessed with this fact in the book and in her person. Nothing has changed much inside. She still bubbles and sometimes boils over in her zest for life today and it’s plain to see that she is the epitome of the committed poet in her irrepressible enthusiasm for life and love and poetry.

So how apt is the title of her book? I don’t think you could get a better one. She says in true memoir style, in shades of Angela’s Ashes that has preceded her, with a razor-sharp memory:

‘I’m from a Saturday night scrub in a steel bathtub

with the smell of Carbolic and Sunlight soap’.

What you see you get and not alone does she not make any excuses for her wild and humble roots in what one might call the Inner City of Limerick in the second half of the twentieth century but she is extremely proud of them. She leaves nothing behind. Everything is lashed out on the table in her own inimitable way of putting things, in the language she was reared on and it’s certainly not that of the drawing room:

‘skates on the ice down-hill in a cracked-arsed basin’

or:

‘galloping bareback up and down our avenue

out in the pissing rain

way into the early hours’.

Old songs crop up here and there, songs like Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore, Way Down upon the Swanee River and Dee-Ol-Ee –Ay. They give the poems a true flavour of the past