National Poetry Day 2025

The City Chapter’s National Poetry Day 2025 event with poets Wendy Sinnamon and Paul Jeffcutt will be held at Armagh Robinson Library on Thursday 2 October 2025 at 7.30pm.

Prior booking is requested by contacting Armagh Robinson Library on telephone 028 37523142 or by e-mail admin@armaghrobinsonlibrary.co.uk

Admission to the event is free, with donations to the City Chapter most welcome.

Wendy Sinnamon is a poet, writer, facilitator and special educational needs teaching assistant from Portadown.

She obtained a BA Honours in Creative Writing and English Literature in 2022 and recently she achieved a Masters with Distinction in English Literature.

Wendy is a recipient of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland Support for Individual Artists Programme and has received several bursaries from The Irish Writers Centre and The John Hewitt Society.

Her debut fiction manuscript was shortlisted for the 2022 Penguin Random House WriteNow competition. She was shortlisted for the 2023 and the 2024 Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing.

Her poetry has been published in Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, The Waxed Lemon and Poetry Bus and several of works were also included in the Fusion anthology published earlier this year by Broken Spine Press.

My poetry often blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, the past and the present. I seek to explore the complex relationship between identity and memory, what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget. I dive into history, personal and shared, ancient and recent, to uncover truths, if any, about the connections we develop with each other and the wider world and how these coalesce and become the self, whatever that means.

Paul Jeffcutt is a writer from Banbridge. He has won thirty-three awards for poetry in competitions in Ireland, the UK and the USA. He has three full collections of poetry: ‘True’, Black Spring Press (2025), ‘The Skylark’s Call’, Dempsey & Windle (2020) and ‘Latch’, Lagan Press (2010). He is widely published in literary journals and anthologies.

Paul will launch his third collection of poetry, ‘True’, published by Black Spring Press at the event. It will be on sale at the special price of £10 during this event.

The poems were all inspired by true stories from real lives. The sources were news reports, exhibitions, diaries, brochures, sagas, public notices, journals, broadcasts, obituaries and word of mouth. They are not ‘found poems’ – instead, each real-life story provided the launch pad for new work. Ciaran Carson called them ‘discovered poems’. ‘True’ brings together my discovered poems, twelve of which have won awards. The book is dedicated to the late Ciaran Carson, founding Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast.

– Paul Jeffcutt

Paul Jeffcutt’s poetry has always been tempted by the coincidental and the accidental, finding strange wonders in juxtaposition and enigma. With ‘True’, this risk-taking reaches a new stage of fluency, insight and daring. Along the pathways of these literally ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ poems, the big themes are explored, in the company of other artists, pioneers, adventurers and plain folk like ourselves. A joy to read.

– Damian Smyth, Head of Literature and Drama at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland