Poetry Off the Shelf: Women’s Voices from Ireland Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Rita Ann Higgins, Caitríona O’Reilly, Leontia Flynn

In partnership with Wake Forest University Press and Culture Ireland as a part of Imagine Ireland 2011, the Poetry Foundation hosts a national tour of four Irish poets. The tour coincides with WFUP’s publication of the revised, much-expanded edition of the poetry anthology, The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry from 1967.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has published eight volumes of poetry and won numerous honors, most recently the 2010 Griffin International Prize. Of her poetry, Seamus Heaney has written: “There is something second-sighted about Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s work. Her poems see things anew, in a rinsed and dreamstruck light.” Rita Ann Higgins is the author of eight collections, including An Awful Racket and Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems. She has “an unstoppable intelligence, which comes off the page in a swirl of humour, deprecation and observation…Higgins is a moving and powerful elegist,” according to Fiona Sampson’s review in the Irish Times. Caitríona O’Reilly’s three books are The Nowhere Birds, Three-Legged Dog (with David Wheatley), and The Sea Cabinet. She produced “The most startlingly accomplished debut collection by any Irish poet since Paul Muldoon’s New Weather in 1973,” wrote a reviewer for the Irish Times. She is editor of Poetry Ireland Review. Leontia Flynn is Research Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast. Her first collection was described in the Whitbread Award Judges’ Citation as “a breathtakingly accomplished debut. These Days transforms Flynn’s experiences into literary jewels. She has exceptional insight and the writerly rigour of a poet many years her senior.”

Co-sponsored with Wake Forest University Press and Culture Ireland