For Immediate Release      London,  20 January 2025

One Mountain: Sold by Cherry Smyth with Lauren Kinsella & Dan Nicholls

Premiere: Flowerfield Arts Centre, Portstewart, 28 March 2025

One Mountain: Sold is a poetic sequence written by Irish poet, Cherry Smyth, in response to a proposed gold mine in the Sperrin Mountains, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Using the words of local people who have protested against the highly toxic use of cyanide in the process and a seventeen-storey building on the mountainside to contain toxic waste, Smyth's poem will be performed near the environmentally-threatened site and in other local venues. This poor, under-populated, rural area, which has a high number of neolithic settlements, stone circles and portal tombs, as well as being officially recognised as a dark sky site, is threatened by twenty years of blasting, and light and dust pollution.

One Mountain: Sold a 55-minute performance, with improvised and composed singing by acclaimed Irish vocalist Lauren Kinsella and renowned musician Dan Nicholls, delivers a poignant narrative that explores themes of historical failure, ecological consequences and economic injustice. Through evocative imagery and lyrical storytelling, the poem paints a vivid picture of the mountain's silent plea for preservation, echoing the voices of past generations who have fought against exploitation. It reflects on Ireland's struggles for independence, drawing parallels to present-day activism against environmental degradation and corporate greed.

One Mountain: Sold vividly portrays the devastating ecological consequences of mining on the mountain's delicate ecosystem. It laments the poisoned rivers, scarred landscapes and displaced wildlife, highlighting the irrevocable damage caused by unchecked extractivism.

Twelve townlands have been licenced by the Crown Estate to the American gold mining company, Dalradian Gold. Alarmingly, in total, 25% of Northern Ireland has been already granted prospecting licences for mining.

The performance is a call to action that recognises that our future survival is bound to a global struggle that relies on the interconnectedness of environmental, social, cultural, economic and ethical values.

"You surrendered ‐ wisdom to bullion ‐
imagination to ingot ‐ earning ‐
in the locked dark ‐ with jitters.
Congested bombs ‐ will crater me.
In a cage ‐ of fast heat ‐ eternity detonates."

Cherry Smyth has a long track record of socially engaged work that explores the complexities of human relationships, primarily the dislocations and contradictions with each other, and with the environment. Her previous collection, Famished (Pindrop Press, 2019) explored the legacy of the Irish Famine and the role of British colonialism in the death or migration of nearly half of Ireland's 8 million people.

One Mountain: Sold will be published in book-length form in Spring 2025 by Arlen House Press

Cherry Smyth is an Irish writer, living in London. She has published five collections of poetry, including Famished (2019) and One Mountain: Sold, Arlen Press House, 2025. Famished toured as a performance in collaboration with vocalist Lauren Kinsella and composer Ed Bennett and participated in the Dublin Literary Festival and Belfast Book Festival in 2019. If the River is Hidden, co-authored with Craig Jordan-Baker, Epoque Press, 2022, is a poetry-prose collaboration, that was performed at London's Southbank Centre in 2023. Cherry was elected a Fellow for the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.

Lauren Kinsella is an Irish vocalist composer and educator,based in London performing within several styles from jazz, folk, contemporary classical to sound poetry and free improvisation. She has worked with many artists including Steve Beresford, Phil Minton, Chris Batchelor, Liam Noble, Veryan Weston, Julian Siegal, Yves Roberts and Hannah Marshall. Currently she sings and composes in several projects including Snowpoet and bassist Ruth Goller's Skylla. Her latest album with Snowpoet entitled Thought You Knew featured in the top ten 2018 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll.
www.laurenkinsella.com

Dan Nicholls is a keyboardist, producer and curator with an expansive and entangled practice in the field of sound. Casting aside dogma and seriousness to embrace joy and improvisation to search for deeper narratives, Nicholls' work finds depth and form through nimble experimentation ‐ collaging and diffracting material from many places, sonic and otherwise. They have worked with electronic music pioneers such as Squarepusher, Goldie and Matthew Herbert, alongside prominent figures in the European jazz and improvised music scenes and deep collaborations with dance, film and visual art. They have performed at disparate venues from London's Royal Albert Hall to the smallest experimental music clubs.
See www.dan-nicholls.com and dan-nicholls.bandcamp.com

If you have any questions, please contact Cherry Smyth at mail@cherrysmyth.com or at 07799 827786 for further information.
X: @CherrySmyth
Instagram @cherrysmythpoet
www.cherrysmyth.com