Jean Bleakney Biography

Jean Bleakney was born in Newry, Co. Down and now lives in Belfast where she works in a garden centre. She studied biochemistry at Queen’s University, Belfast, and only turned to writing in her 30s, after the birth of her children. Her developing passion for poetry coincided with a developing passion for horticulture – many of her poems concern themselves with plants and the symbolic associations – and paradoxes – of gardens. Bleakney was commissioned to design the garden at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s. Every plant is a reference to poetry, and, like Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, the result is a garden which is also simultaneously, somehow, a poem. She has published two collections of poetry, The Ripple Tank Experiment (1999) and The Poet’s Ivy (2003), both from Lagan Press, and is currently working on a third.