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Tag Archives: Irish poetry
“Something is gone and that’s why you write.” — Eamon Grennan
“I have a double sense of things, but I tend to write about what’s under my nose. I write about here when I’m here and when I go back to Ireland I write about what’s there. I regard myself not … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged Ireland, Irish poetry, poetry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Seamus Heaney
4 Comments
“Name and name and name the obscure places, people, or events.” — Patrick Kavanagh
Patrick Kavanagh, titanically angry Irish poet, was born on this day in 1904. He came of age during the Celtic Renaissance and he thought it was all a bunch of bullshit. That is not a direct quote. He was much … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Austin Clarke, Eavan Boland, Ireland, Irish poetry, Michael Schmidt, Patrick Kavanagh, poetry, Seamus Heaney
5 Comments
“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” — Oscar Wilde
It’s his birthday today. One of my heroes. His mother, Jane Speranza Francesca Wilde (aka Lady Wilde, aka “Speranza”) was an incredible woman, in the Irish literary history canon, and there before her son. (She has a cameo in a … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, Theatre, writers
Tagged fiction, Ireland, Irish poetry, Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann, Seamus Heaney
22 Comments
“You cannot write and answer the phone.” — Paul Durcan
Today is his birthday. I love him. He died in May of this year. Paul Durcan’s poems are chatty, observant, scathing, often very funny. He uses long humorous titles: “The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986”, or “Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography”. … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Ireland, Irish poetry, Micheál MacLiammóir, poetry
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“Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question marks.” — Ciarán Carson
It’s Ciarán Carson’s birthday today. He died in 2019. Paul Muldoon’s name invariably comes up when Carson is mentioned (post about Muldoon here). They share similarities (Northern Irish settings/concerns, long chatty lines, postmodern accumulation of detail, the use of humor, … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Belfast, Ireland, Irish poetry, poetry, The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry
6 Comments
“I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.” — Eavan Boland
“I began to know that I had to bring the poem I’d learned to write near to the life I was starting to live. And that if anything had to yield in that process, it was the poem not the … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Eavan Boland, Ireland, Irish poetry, Michael Schmidt, poetry
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“I refuse to have what is known in the trade as a ‘coherent metaphysic.'” — Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide
“I’ll never forget reading his first short poems in the early sixties; they had a kind of hypnotic power, as if a new Orpheus had emerged from Newcastle West. He was Limerick’s Lorca.” — Seamus Heaney on Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide … Continue reading
“Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.” — Louis MacNeice
“Self-assertion more often than not is vulgar, but a live and vulgar dog who keeps on barking is better than a dead lion, however dignified.” — Louis MacNeice Born in Belfast on this day in 1907, Louis MacNeice went to … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Belfast, Elizabeth Bishop, Hugh MacDiarmid, Ireland, Irish poetry, Louis MacNeice, Michael Schmidt, poetry, W.H. Auden
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“I like myself poems that are gentle rather than arrogant intellectually. Where language fades into cries or whispers.” — Medbh McGuckian
“Hate those two words together, they are so unwomanly and unpoetic together they cancel each other out. ‘Poet’ I don’t like or ‘woman’ or ‘man’ none of these words although I have had to use them. ‘Female’ not much better. … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Belfast, Ireland, Irish poetry, poetry, Seamus Heaney
3 Comments
“I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.” — Michael Longley
Poet Michael Longley was born on this day in Belfast in 1935. He died in January of this year. He went to Trinity where he studied classics. Much of his poetry shows a classical influence, with references to the ancient … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Belfast, Eavan Boland, Ireland, Irish poetry, poetry
4 Comments