After Yeats – the World of Irish Poetry

Speaker: Harry Clifton

Time: 13:00- 15:00 p.m.

Date: 31 October 2016 (Monday)

Venue: Room 115, English School Building, BFSU

About the Speaker:

Harry Clifton was born in Dublin in 1952, and has lived in Africa and Asia, as well as more recently in Europe. He won the Patrick Kavanagh award in 1981 and has been the recipient of fellowships in Germany, France, the United States and Australia. He has published five collections of poems, including The Desert Route: Selected Poems 1973-88 and Night Train through the Brenner, with Gallery Press. On the Spine of Italy, his prose study of an Abruzzese mountain community, was published by Macmillan in 1999. A collection of short fiction, Berkeley’s Telephone, appeared from Lilliput Press in 2000. Secular Eden: Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 was published by Wake Forest in 2007 and won the Irish Times Poetry Now award. He has taught in Bremen and Bordeaux universities, as well as Trinity College and University College Dublin. He returned to Ireland in 2004 and lives in Dublin. The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass was published by Wake Forest and Bloodaxe Books in 2012, and The Holding Centre: Selected Poems 1974-2004 in 2014. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2010 to 2013.

About the topic:

The Irish poet and Ireland Professor of Poetry Harry Clifton will read from and discuss the work of William Butler Yeats and his two great Irish successors Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney, with special reference to wider intellectual issues between Ireland and elsewhere, and will also read from The Holding Centre his own selected poems.