Irish Women’s Poetry
Introducing: The Boys of Bluehill
Wake Forest University Press is proud to announce the arrival of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Boys of Bluehill. In her newest collection, Ní Chuilleanáin addresses the themes of music, religion, art, and language to create a beautiful union between revelatory imagery and an acute poetic sensibility. Of her work, Seamus Heaney remarked: “There is something second-sighted about Eiléan Ní Chulleanáin’s work….
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Closed Bells” by Medbh McGuckian
As we transition into winter, Medbh McGuckian’s frosty poem Closed Bells reminds us of the fast-dropping temperatures. Her fleshed out, frostbitten images offer the characteristic “wordlessness” for which McGuckian is best known and create a dream world suspended in the mid-season chill. Closed Bells Frost hollows small areas of leaf in gardenless margins. Wounded by the thought of nests expanding, they inspire devotion…
Continue ReadingWhat does Ireland’s official Professor of Poetry do?
In September of last year, WFU Press’s very own poet, Paula Meehan, was appointed to serve as Ireland’s newest Professor of Poetry. This prestigious position, which is Ireland’s equivalent to the U.S. Poet Laureate, was founded by an independent Board of Trustees in response to Seamus Heaney’s 1995 win of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Of the six individuals (including…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Airports” by Leontia Flynn
It’s Homecoming week at Wake Forest, so we have selected a poem for today which reflects on the liminality of travel. We wish a safe journey to all alumni making their way back toward their alma maters, be it via skyways or highways. Airports Airports are their own peculiar weather. Their lucid hallways ring like swimming pools. From each sealed lounge, a…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Persephone Suffering from SAD” by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s The Water Horse is a particular gem because of the collaboration of three great female Irish poets; Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems are in Irish, with English translations by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian. These poems present other convergences, particularly the mingling of mythology with modern life as in today’s poem.
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Pier” by Vona Groarke
Only a few weeks remain before students return to campus, and our hottest days seem to be behind us. As we desperately hang on to summer, we offer Vona Groarke’s poem, “Pier,” as a celebration of the freedom and elan that summertime allows. Pier Speak to our muscles of a need for joy. …
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: Caitriona O’Reilly’s “Sleep and Spiders”
We are looking forward to kicking off next year’s publishing calendar with Caitríona O’Reilly’s newest volume. But since it’ll be many months until we can share those poems with you, we chose one of her poems from The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Volume I. As the editor of that volume writes, O’Reilly’s voice is “consistently…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Calendar Custom” from The Sun-fish
Calendar Custom What is the right name of that small red flower? It’s everywhere, spilling down over the stones In the sun, every year at just this time. The colour dims for a minute as the line of dust Follows the loud white van uphill, and just now The girls in the bar offer me…
Continue ReadingThe End of the Line
The temperature is high, the pollen is present, and graduation is just around the corner. However, with the arrival of springtime blossoms comes the departure of most of our staff. Interns Nicole, Maura, Amanda, Julie and Mike are all graduating, and Candide is retiring from Assistant Director. And while I feel inclined to use the…
Continue ReadingDaily Poem: “Bessboro” by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
This is what I inherit—
It was never my own life,
But a house’s name I heard
And others heard as warning
Poem of the Day: Paula Meehan’s “The Lost Children of the Inner City”
“The Lost Children of the Inner City” History Lesson We read our city like an open book— who was taken and what was took. Spelt out in brick and mortar, a history lesson for every mother’s daughter. Who owns which and who owns what? The devil owns the bleeding lot! By National Library of Ireland…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Day: Hotel by Medbh McGuckian
Hotel I think the detectable difference between winter and summer is a damsel who requires saving, a heroine half- asleep and measurably able to hear but hard to see, like the spaces between the birds when I turn back to the sky for another empty feeling I would bestow on her a name with a…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Day: The Door by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
The Door When the door opened the lively conversation Beyond it paused very briefly and then pushed on; There were sounds of departure, a railway station, Everyone talking with such hurried animation The voices could hardly be told apart until one Rang in a sudden silence: ‘The word when, that’s where you start’– Then…
Continue Reading“Seed” by Paula Meehan
Beautiful poem about winter’s end and the rebirth that springs ushers in.
Continue ReadingMedbh McGuckian speaks about The High Caul Cap: “the cap is an end and a beginning”
In today’s Irish Echo, Peter McDermott interviews Medbh McGuckian on identity, inspiration, Seamus Heaney, and why she reads books upside down. McDermott’s article offers a glimpse into the poet’s thoughts behind her most recent book, The High Caul Cap, which WFUP published this past autumn. Here’s a link to the interview: McGuckian speaks candidly, revealing that the crux of the volume…
Continue ReadingPoetry By Heart
Earlier this week, the Poetry Book Society (UK) announced that Sinéad Morrissey is the winner of the TS Eliot Poetry Prize. We published Morrissey in our first Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry and The New North: Contemporary Poetry from Northern Ireland. The Independent asks Morrissey if she is in favor of students in school learning poetry by…
Continue ReadingBook of the Month: Paula Meehan’s “Painting Rain”
For November, the book of the month is Painting Rain, the 2009 collection of poetry from Paula Meehan. Painting Rain is full of sadness, and death, and memory; images of the present are wrapped up with the past. This is a book about how things change, will always change, will never remain the same. In…
Continue ReadingMaura Holding Máire
……. …………………………………………………………………………………………….. We have just begun work on An paróiste míorúilteach/The Miraculous Parish, a book of selected poems by Irish language poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi. The first time we worked with her was for our Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry Volume 2, and we are honored and delighted to work with her again. This…
Continue ReadingA Sort of Homecoming
There is something special about returning to a place that you call home, whether it is a childhood memory, a small town left many years ago, or even a country returned to after being abroad. It is the feeling of familiarity tinged with change; something is different even though so much remains in tact. Maybe…
Continue Reading‘Tis the season for Poetry Readings
Everyone knows that poetry is best when listened to, so kick back, relax and belatedly celebrate National Poetry Day with some readings from our poets. Conor O’Callaghan reading “January Drought” from his newest collection, The Sun King. WFUP will publish the North American edition in December. Conor will be reading from The Sun King at the…
Continue ReadingDream Language
” …you swim from core state to fugue state in undirected milky water to a black-filled circle, which is your fully fledged city dwindled into a village” — from “Broken Pot Used as Writing Material” Here at WFU Press we’re busy with the final…
Continue ReadingToday’s Lit. Crit.
Milk Could he have known that any stranger’s baby crying out loud in a street can start the flow? A stain that spreads on fustian or denim. This is kindness which in all our human time has refused to learn propriety, which still knows nothing but the depth of kinship, the depth of thirst. -Moya…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week — “On Cutting One’s Finger While Reaching for Jasmine” by Medbh McGuckian
(photo from flowersreview.blogspot.com ) “On Cutting One’s Finger While Reaching for Jasmine” She talked about the aboutness of life, the eternal false illumination of the leftover nights, her lavender- skirted self who paced around the tousled bedroom, the otherwise good you. She incessantly made Os, Os of all sizes, Os inside one another, always drawn backwards in…
Continue ReadingThe Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Volume 3 Launches in Paris
The Paris launch earlier this month included readings by the anthology’s featured poets, an appearance by Volume 3 editor and author of the forthcoming book The Sun King Conor O’Callaghan, as well as a lecture on the state and future of Irish poetry by Wake Forest Press director Professor Jefferson Holdridge. We at the press…
Continue Reading“Legend of the Walled-up Wife” featured in “The Antioch Review”
The spring 2013 issue of The Antioch Review takes a thoughtful look at our recent volume, Legend of the Walled-up Wife, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s translations of Ileana Mălăncioiu’s poetry. Written under the Ceaușescu regime, the book has dark, chilling imagery throughout and critic Benjamin S. Grossberg writes: “Mălăncioiu often blurs the line between life and death, creating the sense of…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week — “Love Song” by Sinéad Morrissey
What does love look like to you? Love Song I see light everywhere Over the bus driver the woman With her trolley in the street I see dusk I hear the clock at four I hear the silence in cupboards Birdsong Backwater dawn I taste drier than flour I smell the roots of trees Before…
Continue ReadingHappy World Poetry Day!!
Today, all of us a Wake Forest University Press hope you’re enjoying World Poetry Day!! Our internet community has been helping us celebrate in many ways. First, we’re excited to see that The Poetry Project for poetry and art from Ireland has recently added a new project inspired by Paula Meehan’s “My Father Perceived as…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week — “Again” by Kerry Hardie
This poem by Kerry Hardie is from the Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry. The best part of Winter is knowing that Spring must come “again,” and the bad weather and cold temperatures must come to an end. Today on March 1st, we say, “Here’s to Spring!” Again Spring comes roundly, as the round…
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