For poet and photographer Siobhan Maher artistically combining words and images started as a hobby, but it soon became a passion. While suffering from dyslexia, the written word captivated and intrigued her, and with the encouragement of friends and sympathetic teachers Siobhan overcame societal stigma to write poetry that is both finely crafted and echoes a deep affinity with nature. Not content with remaining in the written medium, Siobhan uses photography to bring a different understanding to her words, and ‘photopoetry’, in Siobhan’s understanding, was brought to life, the ultimate culmination of which is Journeying - Photopoetry to revive your Soul.
Journeying is both earthy and transcending, with the poet aiming to open readers’ hearts and bring them inner tranquility through an artful marriage of word and image. Journeying can also be appreciated as an exercise in mindfulness and meditation, an invaluable tool to help ease stress and dwell on what is truly meaningful.
Journeying - Photopoetry to Revive your Soul
Imagery is part of the language of poetry – the landscape, the energy of a particular place and or moment, or photograph – its past, present, future. In a very spectacular way they complement each other. This is one of the reasons poets will stand for long periods of time in one place that connects them to the resonances. They become travellers in time and of that landscape, the features and the feelings contained there in those moments, how the light changes it, how any moving part draws them further in. This is what feeds into the poem and writings of poets and philosophers. It invokes memories and experiences from their own lives, how short the perceptions and encapsulations of life in the universal scheme of things really are, which remakes the poem and the landscape, even the flower and sunbeam through clouds, so powerful. It is the reader and all those who receive this message in the poetics and in the dynamics of a moment who become the witness for themselves and others, always discovering and rediscovering.
So study the lines and study the photos in this wonderful collection of photopoems by Siobhan Maher. Whatever crosses your path or mind has been triggered, such is the power of the experiences she is gifting – the great mystery of mortal human life witnessing the magnificence of nature. Take your time and be absorbed, explore the intensity – inward, and the contemplation, the transcendent connections. These photopoems are a continuing conversation, her collaborations with nature are a tool as she writes ‘offering mindfulness and meditation in troubling times’ one for each week of your year. A human mind’s eye experiencing the world, its sunbeams captured in a poem and an image, in the way that image inspires words, calls for description, the act of translating the moment and the gifting of it into the magic of rhyme. This is what happens to her, see what she has created with her experiences – this tool for healing. So take these images, the photos and poems, with you, and make them your own, as a salve for your spirit and soul. Then go out and make your own.
Michael J. Whelan
Oct 2023