Q:  Eleanor, could you outline your poetry influences? The poetry books in my home growing up were by Yeats, Thomas Kinsella and Kavanagh, and so those were the poets I read and loved first. It was a gift to read Sylvia Plath and discover her unflinching, disruptive, blistering poetry. I would say that reading Paula Meehan gave me permission to be brave in my writing, to discard old and limiting notions of what a poem should consist in. I love to read Charles Simic for his ma

Maeve McKenna’s debut pamphlet A Dedication to Drowning (Fly on the Wall Press) 2022, and Body as a Home for this Darkness, 2023. Preparing a pamphlet 1)      Patience is essential, the poems themselves require time to evolve, deepen and settle.  Poems given time to develop are often more refined. 2)      Know your poems, spend time with them.  Identify which poems belong together and curate a selection that offers a coherent and meaningful experience for the reader. 3)     

Attracta Fahy, Dinner Through the Fields, winner Fly on the Wall Press Chapbook Competition, 2019.   In choosing poems, I relied first on my intuition.  I also focused on poems that had already been published.  I started with a group of poems that I was confident about and I found a theme that connected them.  The next step was selecting poems that continued to reflect this theme while also highlighting sub themes.  My aim was to choose poems that were evocative and relatable

1.      Check out the guidelines, submissions open from Jan 12 to Mar 8 2026. Submissions | 3pillarspress   2.      To theme or not to theme : If you have a clear theme that’s great but make sure you are not saying the same thing over and over again. You do not necessarily need a theme but the poems need to have some sort of coherence. Think of them as a patchwork quilt, each square/poem has its own integrity but look for the threads that connect and hold the whole thing toge

A pamphlet of poems, although smaller than a first collection – does not necessarily mean less.  A pamphlet introduces a new poet, therefore the same guidelines apply when preparing your work for publication whether it is a small or large group of poems. Many writers publish their first poetry book in pamphlet form – James Joyce and Dylan Thomas to name just two.  A pamphlet is a group of 20 -25 poems that showcase a poet’s range, form and skill, indeed a pamphlet can be one