Denise Ryan

Denise Ryan’s poetry has appeared in THE SHOp, Crannog Magazine, Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, Skylight, Ginosko Literary Journal, in addition to inclusion in the 2012 anthology Prose on a Bed of Rhyme published by Swan Press. Her poetry was also shortlisted and runner-up in the 2012 Francis Ledwidge and Jonathan Swift poetry competitions, as well as contributing two poems to the National Famine Commemoration, one of them read in Dublin and at the twinning commemorative event in New York City in 2010. Her poetry was also read on NPR, National Public Radio affiliate WPR, Wisconsin in 2020. She is a long-term member of the Rathmines Writers Workshop.

 

 

“Once in a blue moon, a new collection of poems comes into my life and stops me dead in my tracks with the power of its originality. I journey wide-eyed from poem to poem and am mesmerized by the poet’s utterly unexpected choice of words, quite unlike anything I have ever witnessed before. I cannot recommend Denise Ryan’s collection, Of Silken Waters, highly enough, and it’s the best thing that has heppened to me for a very long time.”

Pat Ingoldsby, poet, playwright, writer and performer

The distinctive voice of Irish-born Denise Ryan is strikingly captured in the debut collection of selected poems ‘Of Silken Waters’ that offers an immediate entry into her world, but also expresses an implicit realism that consistently sustains their compelling thematic substance. Intuitively savvy to the nuances of words, Ryan’s poetry is a skillful modulation of her own symbolic iconography that effortlessly draws the reader into her world. Her purity of heart and courage to rise above all tragedy always finds poetic redemption bravely measured against her authenticity as a woman. As such, her poetry continually affirms the very purest of poetic expression without pretension or self-consciousness. Denise Ryan’s Of Silken Waters is a work of enduring quality and courage that maintains its light in spite of the mercurial face of darkness that surrounds us, bringing the reader to a loftier realm of spirit, to a deeper meditation on beauty, darkness, light, joy and the struggle to maintain the heart in the shadow of all adversity.

The Literary Yard