A Night of Music and Poetry: Bossa Nova Blue & Macha Press Poets

Wind down on a Sunday night with some music and poetry in Seatons of Sailortown!

Bossa Nova Blue
Meabh Cormacain and Paul Webster reinterpret the songs of Tom Jobim, Vinicius de Moraes and Joao Gilberto. They play traditional Brazilian melodies and familiar songs with a bossa twist across voice, violin and guitar bringing a passion and authenticity rarely found outside of Brazil. Bossa Nova is the melancholy samba jazz of 1950s and 60s Rio de Janeiro. The sea, sun, sand and exquisite longing for love were captured by poets and musicians who made their home in the beaches and mountains of the ‘cidade maravilhosa’.

Macha Press Poets

Susanna Galbraith is a poet from Belfast. She has a particular interest in areas where literature and visual art overlap and interact. She is an editor of Abridged magazine. Her poems and essays have been published widely, and she has received several Arts Council of Northern Ireland awards. Her debut collection, Morsels, was launched in 2025. 

Máighréad Medbh is a poet with nine published books and a reputation for compelling performance. Since her debut with Blackstaff Press in 1990, she has performed widely in Ireland, Europe, the UK and US.  She works mostly in long-form sequences  and her ecological verse novel, Parvit of Agelast was shortlisted for the 2017 Pigott Prize.

Macha Press is an all-island poetry publisher founded in 2024. We are a not-for profit collective, and all income generated by sales and fees to editors goes back into the press. We publish two books per year, one by an emerging poet and one by an established poet. The twin aims of Macha Press are to publish poetry by marginalised voices, including work that is innovative, hybrid and intercultural, and to promote the visibility and dissemination of underrepresented poetries to a wider audience.