Publications
SAVAGE TALES
“At some point the things that I had been writing without knowing what they were started to form a pattern; and within this pattern I could see connections with a surprising range of other modes: the play, the short story, the lecture, as well as the joke, the found object, the slogan, the fragment. I recognised the potential for a deeper level of organisation. I saw thematic concurrences appearing. A new poetic form was taking shape....”
Tara Bergin in The Honest Ulsterman 2023 on writing her third collection Savage Tales
THE TRAGIC DEATH OF ELEANOR MARX“This collection tells the story of translation and was first inspired by what Eliot Weinberger termed ‘Avant-gardist criticism’. I had in mind a creatively arranged set of poems about translators and their acts of translation. The central image was the mask.
The book’s title refers to the first English translator of Madame Bovary, Eleanor Marx (Karl Marx’s daughter) whose suicide was an almost exact replication of the suicide described in that novel: just one tragic tale of influence and interpretation that I discovered while writing the collection.”
Tara Bergin on the inspiration behind her second collection in a Blog for Carcanet Press
This is yarrow“Although I have studied to PhD level I don’t tend to approach things from an intellectual point of view, certainly not my poetry. My book, This is Yarrow, contains several examples of this. See, for instance, the character Tom Gun (p.44), as opposed to Thom Gunn the famous poet who shared a volume of poetry with Ted Hughes in 1962. The ‘from’ in the title of this poem is my (self-indulgent, though fun) reference to Hughes’s ‘Crow, from the Life and Songs of the Crow’, which I studied for a number of tortuous years for PhD. But other elements of the poem were suggested by a Channel 4 documentary on pornography.”
Tara Bergin on writing her first collection in a blog for Carcanet Press
Listen to Tara’s poem ‘Bridal Song’ read by Julia Winwood on BBC Radio 3 ‘Words & Music’ - “The melting ice gave me a sign in winter…”
ANTHOLOGIES | JOURNALS | TRANSLATION
STRIKE SONNET CHAIN : A corona of sonnets engaging with industrial unrest featuring work by: Tiffany Atkinson – Tara Bergin – Paul Farley – WN Herbert – Sarah Howe – Jacob Polley – Claudine Toutoungi – Katharine Towers – Matthew Welton – Ben Wilkinson published by Whaleback City Press