Tagged: “michael longley”
Poem of the Week: “Circe” by Michael Longley
Originally published in Michael Longley’s debut collection, No Continuing City (1969), “Circe” meditates on Homer’s Odyssey. The poem reflects on Circe’s relationship to the shipwrecked sailors who crashed into the shores of her island in a contemporary context. The poem reads, “At first in rock pools I become their wife / Under the dunes at last they lie…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Ash Keys” by Michael Longley
The title of Michael Longley’s New Selected Poems comes from his poem “Ash Keys,” originally published in his fourth collection, The Echo Gate (1979). As Longley explains in a feature in The Irish Times, his wife, the critic Edna Longley, suggested using the poem title for the collection “because she likes that poem, and she thinks of…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Heatwave” by Michael Longley
In The Slain Birds, Michael Longley doesn’t shy away from images and words of the pandemic and isolation. Infused with the minutiae of daily life and epistemological musings, this poem “Heatwave” brings to light bloody war scenes and clean, cool water—an acceptance of the elasticity when the mind and body seemingly move in opposite directions….
Continue ReadingThe Irish Origins of Halloween: Five Fun Facts about Samhain
Halloween’s oldest roots are in an ancient Irish holiday called Samhain (pronounced sah-win)! Samhain—usually translated “summer’s end”—was in part a harvest festival when Celtic tribes held assemblies, and rulers and warriors conferred and made laws.
Continue ReadingRadio Signals: An interview with Leontia Flynn
Leontia Flynn’s The Radio is out this month, so WFU Press interns gathered to ask the poet more about her newest collection. Written in three sections, The Radio explores the boundaries of home and family life from Flynn’s experience caring for her infant child, to coping with her father’s death, to remembering the influence of…
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…
New 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 ReadingAn Interview with Frank Ormsby on THE DARKNESS OF SNOW
WFU Press interns gathered to ask the poet Frank Ormsby more about his collection, The Darkness of Snow. Written in five parts, the poems explore vast territory from Ormsby’s childhood in Fermanagh, to life with Parkinson’s, to the difficulty of bearing witness in the face of atrocity. Here, the poet discusses poetic friendships, recurring themes in his poetry, and the anti-muse.
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 ReadingA Lil’ Bit of Lit. Crit.: “The Essential Brendan Kennelly”
In their foreword to the Press’s fall publication of The Essential Brendan Kennelly, Terrence Brown and Michael Longley write that “Kennelly’s poetry is instinctively sociable, hospitable as it is the lives, voices, deeds and defining deaths of a host of characters.” Textually, this quality of Kennelly’s work leaps off the page through Kennelly’s written shifts…
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