Patricia Monaghan
Filed under: Authors
Patricia Monaghan, daughter of a Purple Heart veteran of the Korean conflict, is a convinced member of the Society of Friends (Quakers), to which she was drawn during the Vietnam War by its testimonies of simplicity and peace. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Dancing with Chaos, a collection that explores the intersection of eros and chaos using metaphors from contemporary physics. Her earlier collections are Winterburning and Seasons of the Witch, the latter of which won the Friends of Literature Award for poetry. She is also the author of numerous prose works, most recently The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit, a work of narrative scholarship centered on Irish mythology and ecology.
Homefront, a chapbook of poetry exploring the experiences of veterans' children, was published in 2003 by FootHills Publishing. Patricia is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creative Writing at DePaul University in Chicago. "Soldier's Heart" is based on Irish myths of the king driven "mad by din of battle," as medieval poems say, who appears as well in the works of Seamus Heaney and T.S. Eliot. Mad Sweeney (in Irish, Suibhne) has often been employed as an image of the mad artist, but the source of his madness in war is rarely mentioned.
Website: http://www.patricia-monaghan.com/
Winning Entry: Soldier’s Heart
Contest Won: War Poetry Contest 2003, Third Prize
