Helena Nolan

WEB was the brainchild of Arlen House founder Catherine Rose, who appointed poet Eavan Boland as Creative Director. As an editor at Arlen House from 1978, Boland did much extraordinary work to develop, mentor and promote Irish women writers. The founders of WEB writers’ group initially met at these empowering, transformative workshops hosted by Boland, and they have been meeting continuously for almost forty years, making WEB one of the longest-running writing groups in Ireland. Over the decades, WEB writers and alumni have established highly-successful literary careers, publishing books, having plays and film scripts produced, and winning prestigious literary prizes. This anthology of new poetry, prose and drama, edited by Nessa O’Mahony, is dedicated to the memory of Eavan Boland.

Washing Windows III anthology is representative of contemporary Irish literature, and of a new society and a new way of accepting and honouring the talent all around us.

The writers in Washing Windows Too have things on their minds that have exploded into that love-urgency that makes writers write. And, just as it should be, few subjects are off limits. A poet may not always love her inspirational material, but those here revere the act of writing so much - value it so much - that honing their ideas, visions, and insights into poem-shaped, concrete objects has become crucial. It is an honour to witness what has urged these writers to the process of thought, cogitation, sentence, and finally, poem. Many writers use writing as an attempt to solve life's conundrums - to solve themselves. And to understand the self and others better, too, because writing is the best way they know to gain sight into, and survive, the vagaries of life. Perhaps the writers in this anthology are like me - maybe for them, too, writing is their sanity and their joy, their best thinking and settling tool. A poem can be a path into the deepest, purest self, and back out again - through the very act of writing - to a calmer, less frenetic place. Because poets deal with issues that concern them - universal truths, often - certain themes emerge, as they do in all anthologies. In Washing Windows Too, particular groupings of motifs re-occur and these include birth and motherhood; child-love and empty nests; migration and refugees; women's power and agency; bodies, the male gaze, and violence; nature and its beauties; art, creation, and the act of writing itself; uneasy relationships; politics; health and illness; and grief and death. And, because we are living in the early twenty-twenties, the pandemic naturally features in some poems