Professor Aidan Fadden Publishes Three New Poems

Three poems by JCU English Literature Professor Aidan Fadden have just been published in issue 89 of The Cannon’s Mouth, the quarterly magazine for poets in Birmingham (UK). The poems are entitled “The Forever,” “Remote Connection,” and “Sluagh.”

Professor Fadden read The Forever at the JCU Creative Writing Showcase in May 2023. The poem merges elegy with an awareness of the challenges posed by environmental damage and climate crisis, in particular, the threat posed by so-called ‘forever chemicals’ and the need for personal and collective resilience:

He’s declared war now
On plastic, rewrapping
The contents of our fridge
So it’s totally PFA-free…

…His mother would painstakingly remove
plastic windows from envelopes
but grew cynical
the more bad news she saw on TV…

In “Remote Connection,” a professor reflects on the physical distances involved when teaching during the pandemic and the way in which the shared experiences have changed us, using the metaphor of the Panama Canal:

…Where the forty two miles of lock and lake 
and slit-trench hacked from here to there

conjure something of the wrench of when 
we try to connect with how things 

were 
and are now, 

in the Atlantic
and the Pacific, 

of the great before 
and after.

In September, Professor Fadden published two of his poems entitled “The Search For OK” and “Betelgeuse” in the Autumn 2023 issue of Orbis Quarterly International Literary Journal.

“The Search For OK” was inspired by a tragedy in his native Birmingham, the idea coming to him as he made his way to work in Trastevere. In the poem, a philologist who has spent their life searching for the origins of the expression ‘Okay’, something of a holy grail in that particular discipline, tries to come to terms with grief:

…Now I’d return for them before they’d ever even said 
they were meeting at the Mill ‘just to see’ the frozen lake.

So I am not OK, and don’t know if I ever will be.
And as I lie here, wide awake, trawling 

for something like peace, it’s a shadow 
floating under ice but always out of reach.

Professor Fadden’s poems have featured regularly in leading British and Italian print magazines, including Stand, The North, Orbis, Magma, Pagine, and Sagarana.

In Fall 2023, several of his poems, both new and previously published work, will appear in the bi-annual, UK journal Erbacce-poetry. He was selected in the “long list” for the 2023 Erbacce Prize for Poetry among over 15,000 other entries in the annual competition.

Aidan Fadden has also published two novels under the pseudonym Aidan Conway: A Known Evil (2018) and A Cold Flame (2018). He has been teaching at JCU since 2012 in the English Literature Department. In Fall 2023, he is teaching English Composition and the Creative Writing Workshop on Writing Crime Fiction and Thrillers. He also teaches fiction and poetry workshops at JCU.