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Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Poem in Praise of Hysterical Men and Women” by Leontia Flynn
The world is born of hysterical men and women.
Our teeth are shiny as accidental stars.
The hot, brilliant workings of our firmaments
of protons, atoms, axons, dendrites…
Leontia Flynn wins Irish Times Poetry Now Award
This morning it was announced that Leontia Flynn has won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award for her newest volume, The Radio. From the Irish Times announcement: In making their choice, the judges noted “the variance and voracious excellence of new Irish poetry, in books which experimented with long poems, prose poems, biography and translation….
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Áiféilín” by Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh
A poem in Irish by Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, with a translation by Gabriel Rosenstock, from The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Vol. IV (2017)
Continue ReadingNew Selection of John Montague’s Poetry To Be Published this Fall
WFU Press is glad to announce the publication of a new selection of John Montague’s work. A Spell to Bless the Silence: Selected Poems includes work from fourteen volumes written over more than fifty years. Undertaken by Montague and his wife, Elizabeth Wassell, prior to the poet’s death in December 2016, this new selection represents “not only…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Spring” by Alan Gillis
The Irish celebrate St. Brigid’s Day on February 1 to welcome the beginning of spring. Even though we’re not quite there yet in the US, today’s poem by Alan Gillis channels that sense of anticipation for the end of winter. In an interview with the Edinburgh Review, Gillis discusses his experimentation with the pastoral form in…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Seals at High Island” by Richard Murphy
The calamity of seals begins with jaws.
Born in caverns that reverberate
With endless malice of the sea’s tongue
Clacking on shingle, they learn to bark back
In fear and sadness and celebration.
Richard Murphy, 1927–2018
It is with great sadness that Wake Forest University has learned of the poet Richard Murphy’s death. We were proud to be his American publisher, releasing The Price of Stone and Earlier Poems in 1985, The Mirror Wall in 1989, and his Collected Poems in 2001. As Michael Longley noted, “Richard Murphy continues to be a poet of…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Stargazing for Feminists” by Jean Bleakney
Well proud of the horizon,
undressed to kill, the both of them
—full moon all bosomy white
and Venus, faceted and glittery,
as bold as you like…
Poem of the Week: “Roger Hilton, November ’64” by David Wheatley
‘We either touch or do not touch’
across the tides that circulate
from Cornish sound to silver north;