18 August 2019 at 20:00

Eric Sweeney, organ

Mark Roper, poetry

Eric Sweeney was organist and choirmaster of Christ Church Cathedral in Waterford from 1991 to 2018. Those years also saw a period of exceptional creativity as a composer with a repertoire now consisting of three operas, two symphonies, six concertos plus dozens of choral and instrumental works. His work as a composer has been acknowledged by his election to Aosdána, Ireland’s state-sponsored academy of creative artists, by a D.Phil from the University of Ulster, as well as by numerous performances of his music both nationally and internationally.

Mark Roper is an English-born poet now living near Piltown in Co. Kilkenny. His first collection of poetry, The Hen Ark (Peterloo 1990), won the 1992 Aldeburgh Prize for best first collection. He has published six collections since then. A Gather of Shadow (Dedalus 2012) won the Michael Hartnett Award in 2014 and was shortlisted for The Irish Times Poetry Now Award in 2013. Mark’s latest collection is Bindweed (Dedalus 2017), hailed on by RTÉ as ‘a very fine collection, surely one of the best poetry collections published this year’.