The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry Volume III

$19.95

The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry Volume III brings lesser-known Irish voices to our American audience. Editor and renowned poet Conor O’Callaghan has selected poetry by Colette Bryce, Justin Quinn, John McAuliffe, Maurice Riordan, and Gerard Fanning. Additionally, O’Callaghan includes interviews with each author.

From the depressed economy of the 1980s through the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s to the current enforced austerity campaign, Ireland has come “full circle.” The works of these five poets reflect that journey with vital and various voices. O’Callaghan, an Irish poet himself, states: “These poets generally breathed fresh air into poetry in Ireland. If post-modernism means anything, it means choosing one’s own tradition from whatever source.”

Reviews

“These poems are by turns recognizable in the generic expectations of the Irish poem . . . but they are also utterly fresh in their subject matter. . . . The poem, like the musician, needs to find form for the authentic, which is an ethical imperative as much as an aesthetic one. And these poets, for all the ‘postmodern’ gloss O’Callaghan puts on them, are aware that such achievements can occur in the moment of art. . . . Traditional music or postmodernism, there is a breadth of subject-matter and style on show throughout this generous anthology, offering many signs that Irish poetry can still play the true air and maintain a trajectory of emotion and sensibility.”
– Matthew Campbell, Breac