Internationally award-winning poet and writer
SEANG (HUNGERING)
Poetry collection written by Anne Casey, published by Salmon Poetry in June 2025.
Book information:
Summary and extracts on Salmon Poetry website.
Cover illustration by Anthony Quinn www.quirky.ink
where to buy:
'Seang (Hungering)' can be purchased direct from the publisher: Salmon Poetry, and from online book retailers and bookshops worldwide.
SUMMARY:
For the 180th anniversary of An Gorta Mór’s commencement, Seang (Hungering) poignantly reclaims the human story behind the lost history of a group of rebel girls who were daughters of refugees from Ireland’s Great Famine. It seeks to restore voice to these girls and their families, who were silenced over and over during their lives, and who suffered destitution, discrimination, and intergenerational incarceration and hardships largely driven by colonial policies, attitudes and actions in Ireland and in their country of refuge, Australia. Incorporating award-winning research and poetry, Seang offers a beacon for the 473 million children in our world today who are impacted by conflict and extreme food insecurity driven by the same three factors - climate, politics and economics.
RESPONSES TO THIS BOOK:
“Seang is a work that reaches deeply into human suffering and trauma. Anne Casey’s material is harrowing, yet through compassion, through risk-taking, and the dazzling spell of poetry, this book brings us face-to-face with what we should never turn away from: the sinister effects of colonialism and the power structures that destabilise our abilities to act humanely. With these poems, Anne Casey brings dignity to those who have been brutalized and forgotten. The many layers in this book build to epic proportions, its rhythms and interrogations create unforgettable power. Seang reminds us that poetry expresses thought and feeling more lastingly than anything else."
–Judith Beveridge, poet, editor, academic,
Prime Minister’s Poetry Prize winner
“Anne Casey’s Seang (Hungering) is an elegant, multifaceted meditation on the privations meted out to the daughters of Irish famine immigrants to Australia, moving beyond the historical record to explore hunger as both a physical condition and a metaphysical punishment, inseparable in many cases from the condition of womanhood. Casey’s poised, lyrical poems are grounded in the body as the site of originary appetites and suffering, but also attuned to the spiritual hungers generated by separation from language, culture, place and family. Formally and tonally various, moving between the historical and the imagined, the known and the unknowable, Seang (Hungering) offers a searing archive of the female experience that is shot through everywhere with Casey’s sensitivity to the image, line and music. What impresses most is Casey’s sense of voice: by turns epistolary, documentary, confessional, rebellious and ardent, these poems speak to us across time and space, demanding and commanding our attention.”
–Professor Sarah Holland-Batt, poet, academic,
Prime Minister’s Literary Award winner
“At the heart of Seang, Anne Casey’s searing new collection are journeys. This work, a rich, polyvocal, intertextual, and lyric documentary, calls to mind John Montague’s The Dead Kingdom and Michael Coady’s All Souls, both classic explorations of the Irish Diaspora. Seang is underlined by forced journeys endured by women and girls from Ireland to Australia in the wake of the Great Hunger, and by their subsequent journeys within New South Wales as they sought to gain footholds in an often hostile and inhospitable land. Aided by groundbreaking research and great literary skill, Anne Casey brings to vibrant life the experiences and desires of Eliza O’Brien (1851-1876), whose family hailed from Shanagolden in Co. Limerick, and of the many others who suffered in Australian industrial schools and prisons and who, until now, were silent. Seang is a furious, graceful, and deeply moving work of literary witness.”
–Professor Eamonn Wall, poet, academic, Smurfit-Stone Professor of Irish Studies, University of Missouri-St Louis