The Magpie and the Child

Catriona Clutterbuck’s The Magpie and the Child tells a story of great loss, love, and learning. The volume starts from the days before the poetic journey, in a sort of pre-exploration of events before they were events, moving to and through the death
of her child Emily at almost eleven years old from an unsuspected heart condition. . . .

Born in 1964, Catriona Clutterbuck grew up in a farming family in County Tipperary, close to the area where she now lives. She worked as a primary school teacher from the mid-1980s to the early ’90s, before completing postgraduate studies in the University of Oxford. . . . She was the winner of the 1995 Richard Ellmann Prize (in association with Oxford Poetry) and her work was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions Readings in 2006. She teaches Irish literature at University College Dublin.