Tag Archives: Irish poetry

“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

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“I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.” — Michael Longley

“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 … Continue reading

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“I like variety in poetry. I love how it comes in so many guises. As rock lyric, as rap, as note on a fridge.” — Paul Muldoon

“I’m very much against expressing a categorical view of the world. I hope I can continue to discover something, and not to underline or bolster up what I already know.” – Paul Muldoon It’s his birthday today. Like Seamus Heaney … Continue reading

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“That is no country for old men.” — William Butler Yeats

“I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” — W.B. Yeats William Butler … Continue reading

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“Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.” — Austin Clarke

“He cleared a non-Yeatsian space in which an Irish poet might build a confident poetry in English for which the term ‘Anglo-Irish’ is meaningless.” – Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets Austin Clarke was born in Dublin on this day … Continue reading

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“Is there any virtue, for literature, for poetry, in the simple continuity of a tradition? I believe there is not.” — Thomas Kinsella

The Dolmen Press, operated out of Dublin, was founded in 1951 by Liam Miller, and played a crucial part in the development of Irish poetry in the mid-20th century. It was a strictly nationalist operation; before The Dolmen Press, poets … Continue reading

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“The only cause I espouse is man’s right to find his own centre, stand firm, speak out, then be kind.” — Michael Davitt, “Dissenter”

Save your breath, Poem maker Keep it under wraps In the tall tree of yourself — Michael Davitt Both quotes above are English translations of the original Irish language versions, just to be clear. Poet Michael Davitt, born (on this … Continue reading

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“I trust contrariness. I simply rebelled at being commanded.” — Seamus Heaney

It’s his birthday today. For the winter issue of Liberties, I wrote about books, my father, and Seamus Heaney’s poem on Clonmacnoise. Every collection of Seamus Heaney’s work that I own, the poems, the essays, were given to me by … Continue reading

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“I was going upstream, against the current. I was coming from the North before the North had broken”. — John Montague

It’s his birthday today. John Montague has great sentimental value to me. He was one of my father’s favorite poets. I remember being at home – some years ago, it had to be pre-covid (sob) – and Mum pulled out … Continue reading

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

“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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