My name is Podrigal Tumor and all my life I've wanted to fit into nationality, to gender,

to a religion, to a group of friends and I never really felt like I did and poetry didn't

answer that by saying, oh I fit in with poets, poetry answered that by putting me in company

with other people who put language around the idea of not fitting in and thinking that

maybe there's all the questions I can ask myself rather than where I would like fit in.

Sivna is wounded and confesses by Sean Hildt.

There was a time when I thought the sound of a dove cooling and flitting over a pond was

sweeter than the voices of friends. There was a time when I preferred the blackbird and the boom

of a stag belling in a storm. I used to think that the chanting of the mountain gross at dawn had

more music than your voice, but things are different now. Still, it would be hard to say I

wouldn't rather live above the bright lake and eat watercress in the wood and be away from sorrow.

The story of Sivna comes from an 800 year old poem called Buellas Sivna which means the frenzy or

the madness of Sivna's name and Irish from which Sweeney comes. Sivna, the character who's

speaking in this poem, was a king and that king had treated a local saint with aggression when

the saint went on as property. The king had rushed naked from his house to expel the saint from

the property and the saint was so disgusted with this that he cursed the king to be mad and

delivered the edges of himself and society, wandering naked, living in trees for the rest of his life.

And that's what happened and the whole saga of Sivna is the story of Sivna going in and out of

society, being at the edges, going back to his homestead, seeing his family move on, seeing the

repeated vengeance of the saint who keeps on increasing the carcasses towards him. And the story

really is a story of people who find themselves at the edges, where will they find solace and comfort,

where might they find any sweetness. Sivna loves to eat watercress and in Irish mythology,

...