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This mixed-mode PhD comprises an ekphrastic poetry collection, Strange Country, and a critical component that accounts for my research and writing processes and articulates my poetics of ekphrasis as practised in the collection. Strange Country focuses on sheela-na-gigs, stone carvings of naked female figures that prominently depict the vulva, which are found on medieval churches, castles, wells, and town walls in Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales. Historians and archaeologists, as well as poets, have suggested that they were/are variously meant to: act as warnings against lust and sin; ward off evil; aid in conception and childbirth; symbolize female power and sexuality; demonstrate the power of nature to give and take life; signify sovereignty over land and nation; or facilitate passage from one state to another. However, their meaning, dating, and origins are impossible to determine definitively. In contrast to these approaches that decide the sheela-na-gigs' meaning, I aimed to poetically inhabit their semiotic complexity in a full-length collection. This aspiration arose from my research and writing process, which included reading the literature on sheela-na-gigs, visiting over sixty of them, and reviewing from a practitioner's perspective literary criticism on ekphrasis as well as existing poems on sheela-na-gigs by other poets. As I strove for this semiotic complexity in my poems, I deployed a range of poetic techniques. On the one hand, I wrote lyric and narrative associative poems that have a clearly defined, autobiographical poetic persona using a technique I call 'associative ekphrasis'. On the other hand, I also chose to forgo consistent use of this speaker and came to write found and visual poems derived from an archive I compiled of documents on sheela-na-gigs (dating from the 19th century to the present). Finally, I wrote a long poem that uses a hybrid formal strategy. The critical commentary traces my creative decision-making process with a particular focus on the position and function of the poetic 'I'. In the commentary, I use Roland Barthes's notion of punctum and Federico García Lorca's duende to describe my experience of the carvings and my desire to emphasize their inexplicable impact and enigma in my poems. In order to analyze the sheela poems by other poets and to account for my own writing practice, I use literary terminologies and debates relating to ekphrasis, and I employ perspectives on the poetic 'I' from the poetics of lyric 'deep image' and 'postmodern witness' poetry as articulated by Robert Bly, Alicia Ostriker, and Tony Hoagland alongside the 'uncreative' poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin. In addition to contributing a collection of poems to the body of creative responses to sheela-na-gigs, this collection and critical commentary complicate the argument that poems written in a lyric mode are necessarily more expressive, 'creative', or faithful to the ekphrastic object than those written 'uncreatively' using found text and ultimately demonstrate the productive possibilities of an non-polarized approach to these debates.

My practice-led thesis, 'A Dramaturgy of Silence: Composing the Radio Play', develops the argument that the multiple processes of creating silence can become a central dramaturgical tool in the writing of radio plays - the dramaturgy essentially becoming silence. The practice component of the PhD consists of my two radio plays, Orpheus and Eurydice (2015) and The Sky is Wider (2016). Both navigate narrative journeys into and out of silence whilst experimenting with language breakage, the removal of the semantic and considering both the substance of silence and embodied silences within the radio play form. The chapter entitled 'A Typology of Silence', critically and creatively articulates the multiple silences that emerge as part of the practice. These include the notion of silence as punctuation, its realisation as both absence and presence, and its capacity to silence. I further investigate the silence of the body and how the internal voice of what I have called the 'unsilence' can be articulated. The typology does not exist purely as an academic text, but through its playful form explicates the actual process of making silences through playwriting. It recognises that to attempt to categorise and anatomise silence whose very substance is outside of language is impossible, the emergence of silence often exposing the holes in language and challenging its reliability. In the chapters 'Composing the Underworld: Rhythmic Encounters and Excavating the Unutterable' and 'Silence and Sound interventions: The Presence and Absence of the Silent Body', the creative process of the practice is considered critically through the lens of a Dramaturgy of Silence. This thesis argues that the use of silence as the principal dramaturgical tool continually relocates the radio play back into the immediacy of its sound environment, with silence ironically turning up the volume of the radio play and intensifying the acoustic experience. A Dramaturgy of Silence returns to the experimentations of Samuel Beckett's theatre and radio-work, whilst advocating new thinking and experimentation within the radio play form. I draw on the creative work of Caryl Churchill and Virginia Woolf and reflect upon Maurice Blanchot's and Gilles Deleuze's philosophical writing around silence juxtaposed against Julia Kristeva's embodied semiotics, to articulate the dramaturgical possibilities of silence in the radio play and my own creative work.