James Harpur's 'The Examined Life'
James Harpur’s collection The Examined Life is a highly pleasurable sequence of poems recalling his time in an English boarding school in the 1970s.
Read MoreWilliam Wall's 'Smugglers in the Underground Hug Trade'
William Wall’s new book of poems tells the story of a strange year, moving from Italy just before the pandemic started to life in County Cork, culminating in Christmas 2020.
Read More'The Historians' by Eavan Boland
Eavan Boland’s beautiful, wise final collection of poems, The Historians, is a model of how to use language to think about what we are.
Read MoreOn the Design of Poetry Textbooks
Poetry is the most dense and intense literary form. It needs time and space. But too often the design of contemporary textbooks does precisely the opposite.
Read More'Beowulf' by Maria Dahvana Headley
Maria Dahvana Headley’s sparkling new version of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf also features a brilliant introductory essay on the world as it is right now.
Read MoreTelling Tales
Patience Agbabi’s 2014 Telling Tales is a vibrant updating of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and itself a masterclass in poetic form and tone.
Read MoreBeing Betjeman(n) by Jonathan Smith
Jonathan Smith’s enormously enjoyable Being Betjeman(n) is an unclassifiable and highly personal book about the poet, but also about mental health, teaching, parenting and friendship.
Read More'The Kids' by Hannah Lowe
Hannah Lowe’s Costa award-winning sequence of sonnets The Kids is a triumph.
Read MoreSeamus Heaney's 'Mossbawn: (1) Sunlight
This podcast examines Seamus Heaney's poem 'Sunlight', one of the dedicatory poems called 'Mossbawn', which open his 1975 collection North.
Read MoreA Ghost in the Throat
Doireann Ní Ghríofa's remarkable first prose work, as befits a poet, is itself a weaving, as it braids to and fro in its consideration of female bodies, erasures and absences, texts and textures, rooms, ghosts.
Read MoreVoices of Poetry
For many years our school has had a wonderful summer event: ‘Voices of Poetry’, with pupils and staff reading out poems in many languages. It works. It’s often magical. My colleague Ronan has put it together this year as a virtual audio event, and here are 40 minutes of pleasure for you.
Read MoreIn Memory: Eavan Boland
The unexpected news this afternoon of Eavan Boland’s passing felt just like hearing of Seamus Heaney’s death : a sharp, dismayed ‘Ah no. No.’ Losing great writers leaves us bereft, even if we didn’t know them personally. The words of a great poet with a long career like Boland or Heaney seep into us over decades. They become part of what we are.
Read MoreWilliam Wordsworth quotations
Here’s a Quizlet set for those preparing Wordsworth for the Leaving Certificate. Even if you’re not learning these quotations, they should prompt thoughts about key ideas in the poems. The reverse ‘answer’ side includes brief comments on significance. The main thing: use the quotations for thinking purposes.
Read MoreA Portable Paradise
The first poem in Roger Robinson’s book is ‘The Missing’, dedicated to ‘the victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster’, and the last poem is ‘A Portable Paradise’ itself. In between hell and paradise there are poems of tremendous thematic and formal variety. It is a book I’ll keep returning to.
Read MoreSeamus Heaney and the Music of What Happens
Adam Low's documentary on Séamus Heaney for Arena went out on the BBC recently, and before Christmas at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin it received a big-screen showing to a packed audience, including many members of the poet's family. Afterwards (pictured above) Professor Margaret Kelleher, Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature & Drama at UCD and Chair of the board of the IFI, led a discussion with Marie and Catherine Heaney, as well as Adam Low.
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