The Drogheda Creative Writers hosted a poetry reading at Sarsfield’s Bar in Drogheda last Monday night with a very special guest of honour, Nepalese poet Yuyutsu Charma, in attendance.
The recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu Sharma is a world renowned Himalayan poet and translator.
He has published ten poetry collections including The Second Buddha Walk, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nepal Trilogy, Space Cake, Amsterdam and Annapurna Poems. Three books of his poetry, Poemes de l’ Himalayas, Poemas de Los Himalayas and Jezero Fewa & Konj have appeared in French, Spanish and Slovenian respectively.
For half of the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts Creative Writing Workshops at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home. Currently, Yuyutsu Sharma is a visiting poet at Columbia University in New York.
The twenty or so guests at the event were enthralled by Yuyu’s pen portraits of beautiful Nepal and its people.
“Everyone is a poet in Nepal, and Ireland has that element as well!” he told his audience.
He explained that everything in Nepal is sacred, an attitude that has been cultivated for centuries, and that this perspective underlays their environmental awareness there.
Many of the 20 or so guests, from both the Drogheda and Dundalk areas, had an opportunity to read one of their poems for Yuyutsu, who seemed to be very much taken by the poems, the atmosphere, and the hospitality shown.
Yuyutsu Sharma with Writers Group members Jim Rooney, Michael Farrell, John Noonan and (back to camera) Eithne Lannon.
