In celebration of National Poetry Month (and Seamus Heaney’s birthday!), the Maine Irish Heritage Center hosted an evening of poetry readings featuring three extraordinary Maine poets: Robert Breen, Jeri Theriault, and Jeffrey Thomson. The highlight of the evening was a reading of “Helmet”, a poem penned by Bobby Breen about his Boston firefighter’s helmet that he gave to Seamus Heaney in the early days of their life-long friendship. It was read via video by Seamus Heaney’s widow, Marie.

Robert Breen is the author of Undertow: A Tide Pool of Poems and The Shore Digger. His poems have been published in Harvard Summer Review, The Café Review, Boston Literary Magazine, and Communion Arts Journal. His correspondence with Seamus Heaney resides at Emory University’s Rose Library. A Boston native and retired Boston firefighter, he has a BS from the University of Massachusetts-Boston and attended the summer writing program at Harvard University. He lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Karen.

Jeri Theriault grew up in Waterville, Maine and graduated from Colby College, later earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her teaching career spanned thirty-four years, six of them as English Department Chair at the International School of Prague. Her poetry collections include Radost, my red, In the Museum of Surrender, and Self-Portrait as Homestead. She is also the editor of WAIT: Poems from the Pandemic. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Texas Review, The Atlanta Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Plume, and many other publications. Recent awards include the 2023 Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the 2023 Monson Arts Fellowship and the 2022 NORward Prize (New Ohio Review). Jeri lives in South Portland.  

Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and the author of ten books, including Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory and Half/Life: New and Selected Poems from Alice James Books, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and From the Fishouse. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University.  He is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.