Denise McSheehy’s prize winning first collection, Salt, was published by the Poetry Can. She received an Arts Council bursary for the development of work in progress & her poems have appeared in many magazines and been successful in major poetry competitions.
 
She has read her work at a number of venues, including the Bristol Poetry Festival, the Brighton Festival, the Falmouth Poetry Festival; and at Torbay Poetry Festival with the collective Moor Poets.
 
Two recent important anthologies, Her Wings of Glass and The Book of Love & Loss, included her poems. She was awarded an Author’s Foundation Grant (from The Society of Authors) towards work on her second collection, The Plate Spinner, published by Oversteps Books (2017). She currently lives in Devon.
 
Comment:
 
On Salt Prints (pamphlet collection, Jones Press, 2000):
 

The 13 poems that follow… are elegantly and yes, inexorably crafted sculptures in words of which not one is superfluous. Even the space around the printed words is satisfyingly integral to the impact of the verse…

 

Adrian Buckner in Staple 55/6

 

 
On Salt:
 

Like the very best poetry there is nothing of the ‘look-at-me’ on show here.
 
Instead there is a quiet confidence at work in the creation of a particular voice that speaks closely into the reader’s ear and resonates.

 

Maura Dooley

 
 

In Denise McSheehy’s poetry, exterior and interior landscapes converge in strikingly beautiful and surprising ways. Whether writing about cows in a field, or fleas on a child’s leg, her observational intensity and alertness to the lyrical possibilities of language create poems that both revel in and are unsettled by the material world.

 

Gerard Woodward

 

 
On The Plate Spinner:
 

These are poems of much painterly lyricism. Perfectly in habiting her own voice, Denise McSheehy employs a palette of complex living tones, her language strong as spider silk. Initial domestic scenes of intense purpose extend their reach, leading to compelling regions of tender precision and luminous insight. Poised, attentive, at times necessarily and productively tentative, flickering with ‘flamey fumy light’ and observant of ‘light’s geometry’, this long-awaited second collection is beautifully judged, rich in poems devoted to spatial realities and interior reflection.

 

Penelope Shuttle

 
 

Thought and feeling work seamlessly in The Plate Spinner. A quality allowing the reader into an inner space where one becomes rapt as the poet herself in what is discovered there.

 

Michael Bayley