Review
A Montague Retrospective
In 1975 Wake Forest University Press began its Irish poetry program by co-publishing John Montague’s A Slow Dance with the Dolmen Press. Montague was a foundational poet for WFU Press, and we were lucky to have worked with him for more than forty years. In honor of the posthumous publication of A Spell to Bless the Silence, we offer this retrospective look at Montague’s books published in North America by WFU Press.
Continue Reading“Malingering at the Heart of Things”: Review of Harry Clifton’s Portobello Sonnets
Benjamin Keatinge recently reviewed Portobello Sonnets by Harry Clifton in Breac, opening with “Ten rules for the returning emigrant” outlined by Michael O’Loughlin in a recent Irish Times article: “Rule number 1 reads, ‘Don’t come back,’ while rule number 10 reads, ‘Above all: don’t come back.’ As O’Loughlin reminds us, the treatment of returning Irish emigrants is one…
Continue Reading“Revisiting the Revolution”: Review of David Wheatley’s The President of Planet Earth
In the Summer 2018 issue of Poetry London, Claire Crowther writes: Irish poet, academic and critic, [David] Wheatley is firstly a satirist. A previous collection was titled Mocker and there, as well as here, the narrating persona debunks himself along with the world. … Learned but never dry, always witty and surprising, Wheatley scampers through the arts,…
Continue Reading“Violent as upturned books”: Review of David Wheatley’s The President of Planet Earth
“Wheatley has spent his life on geographic margins,” writes Cal Revely-Calder in his review of The President of Planet Earth in the Times Literary Supplement. “To use a pun I imagine he would like, his poetry is accordingly littoral: built around the hard specifics of several shores. … His poetry is about not only how these settings…
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 ReadingThe Sun King Review
Conor O’Callaghan’s forthcoming The Sun King was recently reviewed by Billy Ramsell in The Stinging Fly. Ramsell describes O’Callaghan’s style as “an almost Shakespearean tendency to render reality not only by means of literary devices but in terms of those very tropes and conceits. Again and again in this his superbly reflexive fourth collection parts of…
Continue ReadingLouis MacNeice: Collected Poems NY Times Book Review
In his New York Times Sunday Book Review of Louis MacNeice’s Collected Poems, entitled “Free Range”, David Orr praises the palimpsestic nature of MacNeice’s final volume. There is a haunting quality, perhaps to do with MacNeice’s talent for refrain, which provides a chilling echo that permeates the soul and leaves the reader with lingering questions…
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…
Continue ReadingA Lil Bit of Lit Crit: Richard Murphy
In an issue of the Harvard Review, critic Floyd Skloot wrote about poet Richard Murphy and how his poems at his mid-career are consistently among his best.
Continue ReadingA Lil’ Bit of Lit Crit: “Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry”
Our latest project at the Press has been drafting permissions letters for our upcoming anthology. The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Volume III features the works of five Irish poets and will come out early next year. This week we will be contacting the publishers of these poets’ various works and requesting their permission to use…
Continue ReadingInterns’ Corner: So Many New Reviews!!
Here at the press, we’re really ecstatic about the multitude of reviews our poets have been featured in recently. As if Harry Clifton’s review of last week’s featured poet, Thomas Kinsella, wasn’t coincidental enough, this afternoon, we received our issue Boston College’s Irish Literary Supplement and found a few more surprises. Not only did the supplement include a new review of…
Continue ReadingA Lil’ Bit of Lit Crit.: Harry Clifton on Thomas Kinsella
This weekend, some of you may have seen that our very own Harry Clifton wrote a review on yet another one of our poets, Thomas Kinsella, for this Saturday’s Irish Times! In the review, Clifton writes that in the later work of poets, “we find a flattening out of the poetic line, a casualness that can…
Continue ReadingArts and Culture: Cover Art for McGuckian’s My Love Has Fared Inland
According to a review by Borbala Farago in The Irish University Review, Medbh McGuckian’s My Love Has Fared Inland takes up “familiar themes of creativity and spirituality” and the poems “trace an introspective trajectory” including themes of “death, writing, nature, and love.” Due to the diverse content of the book, it was important for Wake Forest University…
Continue ReadingA Lil Bit of Lit Crit: “The Copious Dark” by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
In his November 2010 review of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Sun-fish, William Logan of The New Criterion commented that “Ní Chuilleanáin loves this stillness, the timelessness of Ireland both passing and passed—stately, measured, the poems unfold in their own time, making very little concession to the reader. They’re full of material things, things with density…
Continue ReadingTravel
Lara Marlowe, author and Washington correspondent to The Irish Times, stated in an interview with the Irish Echo that you’re Irish if “you delight in language, enjoy good company and never lose touch with the sadness that runs through all things.” Although Marlowe is American, she maintains a residence in Ireland and is a world-traveled journalist. In the interview, Marlowe…
Continue ReadingPraise for Michael Longley
Recently, The Boston Globe named Michael Longley’s A Hundred Doors as one of the best poetry books of 2011. “This year Wake Forest University Press has delivered A Hundred Doors by Irish poet Michael Longley, who has yet to receive the American acclaim surrounding many of his contemporaries. In this collection, readers are transported to…
Continue ReadingA Hundred Doors
Michael Longley’s new book A Hundred Doors is already getting rave reviews! Check out this great article in The Guardian about his latest book. And here’s a sneak peak at one of the poems: A Hundred Doors God! I’m lighting candles again, still the sentimental atheist, family Names a kind of prayer or poem, my…
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