I spent two unforgettable weeks in Indonesia in October, 2004. It all started about three years before when Indonesian poet and publisher, Dorothea, Rosa Herliany, of Indonesiatera publishing house, came to read and discuss her work at the University of Hamburg. She had been invited by Professor Damien N. Toda – professor of Indonesian studies in Hamburg. click to enlarge

Professor N. Toda felt my poetry would work well in Indonesian and so the project began to take shape. Poems were chosen from some new work and from two of my books, A World Without Stone and A song for Joanna.
On Monday October 18th I was able to be present at the launch of my book, At Home In The Marshes, in Yogyakarta – thanks to financial aid from the Department of Arts Sport and Tourism in Dublin. The translation was grant-aided by Ireland Literature Exchange, Dublin. So all in all we could be more than grateful to Dublin for having made this project possible.

This week was very successful for a number of reasons: we had a very big attentive audience of about 200 people; some of the poems had been put to music and two bands, Melancholic Bitch and Next of Kin, played these pieces live for us; all the major newspapers covered the event; radio did live interviews with me in the English language and I was able to talk to university students and staff at Sanata Dharma university.
All of this was made possible by Indonesiatera: Rosa, Andreas, Gunawan, Atik, Nana, Arif, Wikan, Dodok, Prasti, Puji; Khotimthem. Thanks to Rosa I spent the first week of my time in Indonesia in Bali where I read at the Writers Festival in Ubud.

I felt honoured when I was told I was the first Irish poet to have a collection come out in the Indonesian language.