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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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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An Interview with Charles Simic, Poet

 
First Published: The Irish Times, July 23, 2005
‘Son,” the poet Charles Simic’s mother would greet him when he visited her in the Chicago nursing home where she spent the last years of her life, “You still write poetry?” He laughs as he remembers. “And I’d say, ‘Yes, mother’, and she’d shake her head and say, [...]

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Kathleen Jamie, Poet

 
First Published, The Irish Times, June 15, 2005
There’s a question that Kathleen Jamie can’t bear to hear. And these days, more than 20 years into her career as a poet, she’s just not entertaining it any more, writes Belinda McKeon
“It was, ‘do you consider yourself a woman writer or a Scottish writer?’ ” she recalls, [...]

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Elaine Feinstein, Poet

 
First Published: The Irish Times, May 9, 2005
Her first poem came to her in childhood. Elaine Feinstein, the English poet who has, since then, written powerfully of so many childhoods, so many lives both fresh and fading, knew right from the start what she wanted to do. “I think that like all poets, I started [...]

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Cultivating the Element of Surprise: An Interview with Poet W.S. Merwin

First Published: The Irish Times, March 20, 2004
Every day, as they work in their garden, W.S. Merwin and his wife Paula edge a little bit closer to their dream of bringing a section of forest on the Hawaiian island of Maui back to its natural state. When Merwin moved to Hawaii in 1977, the land [...]

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