Ireland and its Elsewheres

Ireland and Its Elsewheres is the next volume in UCD Press’s The Poet’s Chair series, publishing the public lectures of the Ireland Professors of Poetry. The Ireland Chair of Poetry was established in 1998 following the award of the Nobel Prize of Literature to Seamus Heaney and is supported by Queen’s University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaion. Michael Longley’s lectures were published in June 2015 and the next volume will contain the lectures of Paula Meehan. In this volume, the distinguished Dublin poet Harry Clifton - who has lived and worked all over the globe - focuses on locating himself and other Irish poets in relation to the literary traditions of Britain, Europe and the United States. Clifton opens by recounting his time living in London in the late eighties and early nineties. He discusses how he and a group of other poets were part of London’s ‘cultural clutter’, and how their poetry reckoned with a time of great social and political upheaval in Britain. The second lecture focusses on Irish poetry’s place in the ‘eternal present’ of Europe.Patrick Kavanagh and Thomas Kinsella are among the poets discussed in this illuminating comparison between neighbouring nations. Clifton closes the collection by extending his discussion on poetry to the United States - a land of exiles and immigrants. From Derek Mahon to Oscar Wilde, Clifton examines Irish poets in the New World, and describes how America has come to mean ‘artistic posterity’ for many of them. From one of Ireland’s leading contemporary poets, this volume gives readers a rare insight into Irish poetry’s place in the world.