Voices of Poetry 2026

The long-standing annual Voices of Poetry event (founded by former English teacher John Fanagan decades ago) took place on Sunday evening in the BSR, the speakers picked out by spotlights at a podium in a darkened hall. This last general event of the school year is a quiet one, a complete contrast to the raucous House Quiz in early September. It is an evening of listening and attention, in the presence of lovely languages. It was again presented by Mr Girdham.

 

First off was Zlata Lazarieva, with an excellent rendition in Ukrainian, followed by Thea Ciofani with Dante from Italian. Next was a first for this evening, a poem in Old Dutch, a very distinctive sound voiced by Roemer Lodewijk. Two Romance languages followed: French (Rimbaud) from Daniel Passmore, and Spanish from Olivia Sanchez.

 

The first English poem of the evening was Emily Dickinson’s ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’, a staple of the Leaving Certificate course, read for us by Daisy Sherwood-Smith. Alex Kierski gave us a piece by the Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska, and then Marie Weber reverted to English with the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

 

Camilla Steffani and Sidonie Wied (with her own poem) both read in German, and Charlotta Rosengren in a language not often heard at Voices of Poetry, Swedish.

 

A resumption of English came with the winner of this year’s Junior Poetry Prize, Daniel Brady and his poem ‘Forgotten Times’. He was followed by another Second Former, Ella Girdham, who read Wendy Cope’s poignant ‘Names’, and two more, Elena Campillo Aviles and Paola Reques Tovar, who shared a reading in Spanish.

 

As Mr Girdham said, many of those reading had also been seen on the BSR stage in November in the successful Shakespeare Society production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including Alice McCarthy and Ferdia Murray (both with Irish), and then Oscar Cleland-Bogle (Kipling’s famous ‘If’) and Jason Otolorin (Maya Angelou).

 

Returning to Ukrainian (and to ‘hope’ as we heard from Emily Dickinson earlier), Pavlo Bezuhli read resonantly, followed by the utterly different Mandarin Chinese of Eric Wang. There was then a second German pair, Nathan Wachs and Friedrich Hinrichs.

 

James Breatnach recited Shelley’s famous sonnet ‘Ozymandias’, Daniel Moran (winner of the Senior Drama Prize for playing Puck in November) a speech from Hamlet, and the Warden gave us a taste of Latin in a Catullus poem. 

 

Safia Walker, the Senior Prefect, read out a work by last year’s winner of the Senior Poetry Prize, Stella Borrowdale, and the very last reader was Delia Brady, who was announced as this year’s winner of the Peter Dix Memorial Prize for Poetry. The trophy (pictured, by sculptor Joe Sloan) commemorates Old Columban Peter Dix, who died in the Lockerbie bombing of 1988.  We headed out into the spectacular light of a sunny May evening, moved and uplifted.

Second Form Public Speaking Competition 2026

 

This weekend saw the annual Second Form Public Speaking Competition take place in the Big Schoolroom. This provides an opportunity for Second Formers who have recently completed their oral Classroom Based Assessments to present them in front of an audience beyond their class sets.

The topics this year were extremely varied, as the compère Mr Girdham said, often jumping from one subject to an utterly different one with a very different tone. First up was Max Morrissey, who talked about wages in professional sport, and he was followed by Fiona Zhong (Could aliens be real?), Sam Butler and Oscar Duggan Geary as a pair (tennis), Ella Girdham (a cold case in crime), Yonette Nel (Irish weather), Alex O’Herlihy (living with cystic fibrosis), Alisha Corrigan (Irish mythology), Henri Rose (‘waking up tiny’), Lucy Branagan (why pigeons are secret government spies) and finally Esmonde Durdin Robertson (why young people are leaving rural Ireland).

Ms Kent-Sutton and Mr G. Clarke were the judges, and they emphasised how much they learned, how often they were entertained, how well all the speakers did on conquering their nerves, and the way all engage the audience with a clearly sequences structure of information. They announced that Fiona had come third, Yonette second, and the winner was Lucy Branagan with her quirky conspiracy-type piece on alien pigeons.

Many thanks to the pupils’ English teachers, Mr Canning, Mr Kirwan and Ms Tyerman, who prepared these pupils and many more over the last three weeks.