Tag Archives: Irish poetry

“All my work is about uncovering, especially uncovering of voices that speak without governance, or that speak without being heard.” — Seamus Deane

Posted on February 9, 2026 by sheila

“So broken was my father’s family, that it felt to me like a catastrophe you could live with only if you kept it quiet, let it die down of its own accord like a dangerous fire … I felt we … Continue reading →

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“I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.” — Jonathan Swift

Posted on November 30, 2025 by sheila

“When a man of true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by this infallible Sign, that all the Dunces are in Conspiracy against him.” — Jonathan Swift I don’t have much time to read for pleasure these … Continue reading →

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“It seems to me that an Englishman in France is an expat, but an Irishman is an exile.” — Derek Mahon

Posted on November 23, 2025 by sheila

“When growing up, my bunch of friends would have thought of ourselves as anti-unionist because we were anti-establishment. We would have been vaguely all-Ireland republican socialists. But then, when theory turned into practice, we had to decide where we stood … Continue reading →

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“Something is gone and that’s why you write.” — Eamon Grennan

Posted on November 13, 2025 by sheila

“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 →

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“Name and name and name the obscure places, people, or events.” — Patrick Kavanagh

Posted on October 21, 2025 by sheila

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 →

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“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” — Oscar Wilde

Posted on October 16, 2025 by sheila

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 →

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“You cannot write and answer the phone.” — Paul Durcan

Posted on October 16, 2025 by sheila

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 →

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“Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question marks.” — Ciarán Carson

Posted on October 9, 2025 by sheila

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 →

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“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

Posted on September 24, 2025 by sheila

“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 →

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“I refuse to have what is known in the trade as a ‘coherent metaphysic.'” — Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide

Posted on September 18, 2025 by sheila

“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 →

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