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Price: €8.88
The Mischievous Boy and other poems
September 2008
The Doll with Two Backs and Other Poems
December 2004
When Love Is Not Enough: New & Selected Poems
June 2010
Honouring The Word: Poetry and Prose, Celebrating Maurice Harmon on his 80th birthday. Compiled and edited by Barbara Brown.
June 2010
The Last Regatta |
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| Maurice Harmon |
ISBN: 1 903392 08 X Page Count: 80 Publication Date: Sunday, April 01, 2001 |
About this Book
Maurice Harmon's poetry ranges from recreations of an idyllic pastoral world on the Ardgillan estate in north County Dublin to memories of psychological numbing at boarding school to scenes of intellectual and sexual challenges and confusions at University College, Dublin. These local settings and experiences contrast with lyrics about the mystery and beauty of Japanese culture and the mythopoeic sequences in A Stillness at Kiawah. One of these draws analogies between the experience of the native American Kiowas and the Irish experience of similar injustice and dispossession; the other explores the cruelties and intensities of a sexual relationship in a post-colonial world. |
Author Biography
Maurice Harmon, Emeritus
Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin, is a
distinguished critic, biographer, editor, literary historian, and poet.
He has edited No Author Better Served. The Correspondence between Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (1998) and has translated the medieval Irish compendium of stories and poems The Colloquy of the Old Men
(2001). He has written studies of several Irish writers, including Seán
O'Faoláin, Austin Clarke, and Thomas Kinsella and edited the
ground-breaking anthology Irish Poetry After Yeats. His Selected Essays
(2006) contains articles on William Carleton, Mary Lavin, John
Montague, and contemporary Irish poetry. A study of Thomas Kinsella as
poet and translator, Thomas Kinsella. Designing for the Exact Needs, was published in March, 2008. His poetry collections include The Last Regatta (2000), The Doll with Two Backs and other poems (2004) and The Mischievous Boy and other poems (2008). |
Sample PoemsThe Last Regatta Letter to My Daughter The cold up north drove them back at us. They slithered across the path beside our feet, burst through screens, breaking and entering. The place so musty we slept on the gallery floor, conscious of timber racked behind our heads, of rustling, slitherings along the roof. Silence stopped me when we came back here. Sevenday locusts no longer had hysterics, no longer blundered from the cherry trees. Spider hammocks sagged like fallen floors in disused rooms. Sated dragon flies no longer rode with swallows or with bats. When you told me your friend was dead, that was the seasons final emptying, good days drained, cold along the boards. The Return I sit by the pond in the spell of ripple and fly stand under trees in the poignancy of leaves lie offshore in the fluency of stems feel the stone's tremor in the drain of waves see pitch and stress in the spider's web find conclusions in a grain of sand discover an air coldly sufficient reliable as the avenue of yew (Copyright Maurice Harmon 2000. All Rights Reserved.) |
