Lunchtime Readings

Wednesday 3 February - Thomas McCarthy

Poet, novelist, editor and critic Thomas McCarthy has published eight collections of poetry with Anvil Press Poetry. He is former editor of The Cork Review and Poetry Ireland Review

"This book represents him at his best and most impressive. He is an indispensable and unique ventriloquist of voices in modern Irish poetry, whose locality-powered centrality should be paid even more attention than it is."
- Bernard O'Donoghue, Irish Times

Wednesday 10 February - Caitríona O'Reilly

Poet and critic Caitríona O'Reilly will resume her position as editor of Poetry Ireland Review from issue 101. O'Reilly was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for The Nowhere Birds (2001, Bloodaxe) and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award in 2007 for The Sea Cabinet.

"The most startlingly accomplished début collection by any Irish poet since Paul Muldoon’s New Weather in 1973"
– Patrick Crotty, Irish Times

Wednesday 17 February - Seamus Heaney

Poet, writer, critic and lecturer Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Click to watch the reading in full.

"Mellifluous broadcaster. Circulator of New Yorker cartoons. 'Jocund company'. Absorbing fellow traveller, whether on the domestic run from Sandymount to Bellaghy (with a caffeine pitstop at some drowsy hotel) or, in the spotless light of New Mexico, on the High Road from Santa Fe to Taos (making a dusty pilgrimage to the sun-stilled, adobe-baked Chimay¢ church, with its 'sacred clay')."
- Dennis O'Driscoll, Irish Times

Click to read the Irish Times special commemorative feature celebrating Heaney's 70th birthday.

Wednesday 24 February - Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Poet, editor, critic and professor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a founder editor of literary journal Cyphers. She has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Irish Times Award for Poetry, and the O’Shaughnessy Award of the Irish-American Cultural Institute. Most recently she was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2009 for her collection The Sun-fish.

"Sun-Fish [is] yet another indispensable Ní Chuilleanáin collection, containing poems that are real as “an old headstone” or “the danced tangle/ of light on the sliding depths”.
- Eamonn Grennan, Irish Times

Click to read A pre-eminent poet of her time, Eamonn Grennan's review of Ní Chuilleanáin new collection.