When More is Less
This colossal volume of Heaney’s poems ‘almost disguises the fact that he is a poet by entombing his lyric in a mass of annotation, exegesis and “uncollected” poems’.
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John McGahern’s World
The deliberate blurring of inside and outside is central to McGahern’s vision, the writer at once being absorbed in his surroundings and yet stepping back to articulate what goes without saying on the daily round.
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The Slaughter of the Trees
A new poem by James Harpur
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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
