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Talks

Seamus Heaney

The Poems of Seamus Heaney

From what Michael Longley has called the “miracles” of his early poems of Ulster country life through his sustained, often anguished, engagement with “the matter of Ireland”, to his late work ranging through mythology and literature, “the country of the mind”, you will hear introduced and read a range of poems from across Seamus Heaney’s writing life.

 

paul muldoon

The Poems of Paul Muldoon

A typical Paul Muldoon poem has a deceptively easy and musical surface.  We are entranced by this surface into letting go of our certainties, certainties of history – especially Irish history – of gender, of identity.  We receive in exchange for our certainties a master class in the contingent, in keeping one’s options open, of living fully in the present.  Truth is truly a shifting value in Paul Muldoon’s world.  The talk looks at poems from all periods of Muldoon’s hugely prolific writing life.

 

William_Butler_Yeats_by_George_Charles_Beresford

The Poems of W B Yeats

W B Yeats’ major achievement was to remake himself continuously throughout his writing life.  The talk follows the poet’s development from the vague, dreamy poems of his youth through the socially and politically engaged poems of his middle age to his splendidly universal late work.  Among the poems introduced and read are The Stolen Child, No Second Troy, Easter 1916 and Sailing to Byzantium

 

Patrick_Kavanagh_monument_at_Grand_Canal,_Dublin

The Poems of Patrick Kavanagh

In a recent Irish Times poll to find the country’s most popular poems 5 of Patrick Kavanagh’s poems were in the top 30.  The poems of Irish country life Kavanagh wrote in the 1930s and 40s have never lost their freshness.  The talk features old favourites like Iniskeen Road:July Evening, A Christmas Childhood and Shancoduff as well as some less familiar poems.

 

Frost stamp

The Poems of Robert Frost

Much of the art in a Robert Frost poem is directed at creating the illusion of a countryman talking to other countrymen.  The rhythms of his verse are wonderfully fitted to the natural rhythms of the speaking voice.  If the English speaking world has a favourite poet, it is most likely Robert Frost.  The talk ranges from the short lyrics, Desert Places and Acquainted with the Night, to the poems of mid length,  After Apple-Picking and Mending Wall,  to the long poems, what he called his “novels” , The Death of the Hired Man and Home Burial.

 

Emily_Dickinson_(Restored)

The Poems of Emily Dickinson

Attempt, using as headings recurrent words from the poems, to impose some order on the more than 1,700 poems of Emily Dickinson and you’ll soon have a long list under Pain or, to name her synonyms for that condition, Woe, Malady, Agony, Suffering.  You’ll need a list called Heaven, also called Eden or Paradise.  Death, that list will require a second column.  Fame, also known as Publication or Renown, will have its list.  There’ll be a list headed Nature but you’ll need a separate one called Birds.  The talk touches on all these headings, bringing to life the hermit poet of New England whose lines are known by heart the world over.

 

Philip Larkin

The Poems of Philip Larkin

The Laureate of the average, of not having too high expectations of life, Philip Larkin’s lines have crept into the language of public and private discourse more that those of any poet in the last 100 years.  Funny, self-deprecating, often chillingly truth telling, Larkin’s poems come to life when read aloud, the language of the poems a subtle blend of the colloquial and the formal. The talk covers Larkin’s three major collections The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows.

 

 

French troopers under General Gouraud, with their machine guns amongst the ruins of a cathedral near the Marne, driving back the Germans. 1918. Central News Photo Service. (War Dept.) Exact Date Shot Unknown NARA FILE #: 165-WW-286-36 WAR & CONFLICT BOOK #: 619

War

The Poetry of War

From the Greeks to Paul Muldoon’s Truce, from Robert Southey’s Blenheim to Tony Harrison on the Iraq war, armed combat has always been a subject generative of great poetry.  Whilst the talk’s central focus is on the soldier poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas and others, it also finds room for war poems from across the ages, from Walt Whitman’s poems of the American Civil War to Michael Longley and others logging the Northern Ireland Troubles.

 

ireland

A Poetry Tour of Ireland

From Derek Mahon’s The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush to Francis Mahony’s The Bells of Shandon, from Michael Longley observing the progress of a funeral in Mayo to Oliver St. John Gogarty’s rousing Ringsend the talk introduces us to over 20 poems written about places around Ireland.  Other authors encountered along the way include Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Philip Larkin, John Montague and Frank Ormsby, his sublime Roslea Hero.

 

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A Poetry Tour of the USA

I Hear America Singing, sang Walt Whitman.  The talk goes on the trail of Whitman’s poet successors who have sung and celebrated places across the American continent.  From Allen Ginsberg’s A Supermarket in California to Billy Collins’s Fishing on the Susquehanna in July, from Carl Sandburg’s Chicago to poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane  and James Wright.  Who could resist a poem entitled Lying in a hammock at William Duffy’s farm in Pine Island, Minnesota?

 

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Poems for Christmas

From accepted classics of the genre such as Thomas Hardy’s The Oxen and John Betjeman’s Christmas Eve to lesser known poems by writers as diverse as Wendy Cope and Christina Rossetti, the talk is a tour of Christmas poems past and present.  The Irish Christmas is celebrated in poems by, among others, Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, John Hewitt and Paul Muldoon.