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Poem of the Week: “Peace” by Ciaran Carson

Back then, you wouldn’t know from one day to the next what might
happen next. Everything was, as it were, provisional…

Poem of the Week: “Kassapa” by Richard Murphy

Perhaps the king, whose name evoked the sun,
Riding his elephant, under a pearl umbrella
Through parched rice-fields on the dry zone plain,

Had seen this rock aspiring from the earth…

Wake Forest University Press Gets a New Home

When Wake Forest University Press got started in 1975, our Founder Dillon Johnston ran the press out of his office in the English Department. As operations grew, we moved into Carswell Hall, and then later into the old bomb shelter in the basement of Tribble Hall. A bomb shelter seemed particularly appropriate for a poetry…

Poem of the Week: “The Antikythera Mechanism” by Caitríona O’Reilly

You may have already noticed the odd mechanical look of the Google logo this morning. To our delight, today’s Google Doodle celebrates the 115th anniversary of the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism, the first-known analog computer used by the ancient Greeks as a sort of calendar and predictor of astronomical positions. Caitríona O’Reilly’s poem about this very…

Poem of the Week: “Girl on a Swing” by Thomas Kinsella

The sensation of swinging is that of both freedom and dependency; as you fall through the air, you can feel excited and terrified at once. Like a swing, this sweet little poem shifts, connecting us to the feelings of “panic and delight” that Kinsella so gracefully describes. Girl on a Swing My touch has little force: Her infant body…

A Very Kinetic National Poetry Month

National Poetry Month is the largest celebration of literature on the globe. The month of April is meant to encourage readers of all ages to engage with poetry in some way, to illuminate the important mark it has made on the cultures of so many peoples. The Academy of American Poets established NPM in 1996….

Poem of the Week: “Melusine” by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

This week’s poem comes from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s most recent volume, The Fifty Minute Mermaid, a selection of which was included in The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry. Ní Dhomhnaill’s narrative poem, “Melusine,” is based on folklore most famously captured by the 14th century French writer Jean d’Arras. In the tale, Count Raymondin meets the…

Poem of the Week: “A Half-finished Garden” by Brendan Kennelly

Because her days were making a garden
She haunted that particular beach
Drawing rocks, sticks, shells and stones,
Random-pitched sea-gifts, over the years …

Poem of the Week: A Sonnet by Harry Clifton

This week we celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day, a holiday that originally commemorated the arrival of Christianity in Ireland, though is now more commonly a celebration of Irish heritage, especially in the US. Harry Clifton’s latest collection, Portobello Sonnets, is a fitting selection to mark this holiday, as it is a meditation on Dublin as a microcosm of the…

Poem of the Week: “Jesse” by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Jesse As you lie in sleep there grows like a lung inflating A tree out of your navel, enlarging and toppling Into its perfection when the leaves and the fruit are soft as air, Are drenched like capillaries, and as they swell They become transparent and fade away: The true tree of knowledge which is…