Nocturne
A new poem from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
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A Fruitful Reticence
Vinegar Hill, by Colm Tóibín, Carcanet, 144 pp., £12.99, ISBN: 978-1800171619 The Poems (1961-2020), by Derek Mahon, The Gallery Press, 532 pp., £19.50, ISBN: 978-1911338048 On Elizabeth Bishop, by Colm Tóibín, Princeton University Press, 210 pp., £14.99, ISBN: 978 0691154114 Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pp., £14.99, ISBN: 978-0374125585 Selected Poems,…
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Imperishable Song
One of the many remarkable aspects of the recent selection of Seamus Heaney’s letters (The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid, published by Faber & Faber) is the recurring echo of WB Yeats’s voice. Heaney frequently used Yeats’s vocabulary and diction when writing to fellow poets or others likely to appreciate the echo….
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Lost Poets’ Society
I teach a class in Irish poetry a couple of times a year and I always begin with Sappho, fragment 31, chanted in a YouTube video by a chorus of voices in the original Aeolic Greek. It causes confusion: at least two students in every group begin their weekly journal with ‘My favourite Irish poet…
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Death in the Valley
Poems of flight, new beginnings, sad partings and rich harvests
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Rumpled Giant
The greatest 20th century poet writing in English along with WB Yeats
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Otters and Orioles
A well-read eye observes nature over the passing years
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Mad About Poetry
Translating the poem, and the reader into the world of the poem
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Larkin at 100
The elusive depth that lies behind the all-too-explicit ordinariness
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Darts of Thought
An exploration of the complexities of identity and relationships
