Sam McGovern

             St Andrew's College Literature Aloud Prize 2008 and 2009

                                 National Poetry Aloud Prize 2009

The original Poetry Aloud was the brain-child of Niall McMonagle, who is well known to all Leaving Certificate students as the author of Poetry Now. The national Poetry Aloud competition, which is held annually in the National Library and organised in conjunction with Poetry Ireland, began in 2006.

The English Department, and indeed everyone in St Andrew’s College, is delighted and proud that Sam McGovern is the winner of the National Poetry Aloud Prize, 2009. This competition expects students to do much more than learn a few poems by heart and recite them in public. Students are invited to speak their chosen poems; in other words to allow the poems to speak for themselves. This requires a deep understanding of the poet’s purpose and of the poetic techniques employed by the poet in creating the whole effect.

Poetry is rhythmic and has cadences and a music of its own; to be fully understood it must be heard aloud. The poet, Simon Armitage described poetry as ‘imagined talk’. In speaking poetry aloud, a reader who is in tune with the poem can bring the writer’s voice and imagination alive for us.Enjoy Sam’s wonderful interpretation of Seamus Heaney’s St. Kevin and the Blackbird, Nick Laird’s Holiday of a Lifetime and W.B. Yeats’s The Circus Animals’ Desertion.

Hilda Quin