Mostly There Was Silence: Donald Hall, Poet

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, October 10, 2009
EARLY ON AN October Saturday the landscape around Eagle Pond Farm, near Wilmot in the state of New Hampshire, is astonishing to drive through. This is the famous New England fall in all its glory, and it is almost too beautiful for words. But only almost: “These [...]

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An Interview with Philip Schultz, Poet

 
First Published: The Irish Times, April 21, 2009
‘I ALWAYS ASSUMED that I was going to die around the same age as him,” says Philip Schultz of the father he lost almost 50 years ago. “I always thought of that age as some kind of milestone. And then, suddenly, I had lived beyond him.”
Schultz, now 64, [...]

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DLR Poetry Now 2009

I loved every minute of this year’s DLR Poetry Now festival; the poets were terrific, the audiences were large and enthusiastic and frank, and our celebration of Seamus Heaney’s 70th Birthday was a joy to witness (I would say that, but lots of people who were there, including all our participating poets, have told me [...]

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Made in America: Seamus Heaney at 70

First Published: “Heaney at 70″, an Irish Times Special Report to celebrate the 70th Birthday of Seamus Heaney
April 13, 2009
 
WHEN FIRST he spoke to America, Seamus Heaney did not soften the edge of his words. In fact, in his first major interview with an American newspaper, Heaney suggested that it was a certain softness in [...]

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An Accidental Archive: On Interviewing Poets

First Published: Poetry Ireland Newsletter, March 2009

This is how I make my living, or a large part of it: I sit and talk with poets. Sometimes, I go to their houses to talk with them; sometimes, I spend an hour with them in a cafe, or a restaurant, or a hotel bar; sometimes, I sit [...]

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Beyond the soundtrack of the boom: Composer Bill Whelan

First Published: The Irish Times, March 14th, 2009
DEPRESSION HAS TO be outside of our options at the moment,” says Bill Whelan. He’s talking about Ireland. He’s talking about the end of that era in Irish history to which some believe Whelan himself, with Riverdance in 1994, wrote the official soundtrack: the Celtic Tiger. Which is [...]

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On Irish-American Poetry: Daniel Tobin

HENRY DAVID Thoreau imagines himself as a “little Irish boy”, living in a shanty. Walt Whitman addresses “Old Ireland”, where an “ancient sorrowful mother” crouches over a grave. Robert Frost presents us with ‘The Cow’s in the Corn’, a “One-Act Irish Play in Rhyme”, in which O’Toole reads a paper on Home Rule and [...]

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Amiri Baraka, Poet

IN GREENWICH VILLAGE, in 1957, the young LeRoi Jones wrote to the young Allen Ginsberg, then living in Paris, on a piece of toilet paper. “Are you for real?” the letter asked.
“I’m for real,” Ginsberg wrote back, “but I’m tired of being Allen Ginsberg.” The exchange was the beginning of a friendship that was to [...]

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Review: Fiona Sampson, Common Prayer

First Published: The Irish Times, January 26, 2008
‘I lob stones,” says the speaker in Messaien’s Piano, the opening poem in Fiona Sampson’s Common Prayer (Carcanet). In a collection intensely preoccupied with the challenges of form, with its fragile yet dogged conditions, the stones suggest stanzas and syllables; the act of lobbing them, poetry itself.
And about [...]

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Beckett, Rhyme and Reason: Meeting Paul Muldoon’s Rackett

First Published: The Irish Times, August 22, 2007
IT’S A SUNNY Saturday afternoon in Princeton, New Jersey, with students slowly beginning to drift back to the campus of spires and towers for another year of learning. Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet who has taught at the university for more than 15 years, and who currently [...]

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