When Love Is Not Enough: New & Selected Poems

By: Maurice Harmon

€12.00

To mark his 80th birthday Maurice Harmon has brought together poems written in the last two years together with selections from the three collections published by Salmon: The Last Regatta, The Doll with Two Backs, and The Mischievous Boy and other poems. In the pages of When Love Is Not Enough: New and Selected Poems, the range and variety of Harmon's work is evident. He has a distinctive voice, both serious and ...

ISBN	978-1-907056-39-0
Pub Date	Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Cover Image	Jessie Lendennie
Page Count	106
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To mark his 80th birthday Maurice Harmon has brought together poems written in the last two years together with selections from the three collections published by Salmon: The Last Regatta, The Doll with Two Backs, and The Mischievous Boy and other poems. In the pages of When Love Is Not Enough: New and Selected Poems, the range and variety of Harmon's work is evident. He has a distinctive voice, both serious and playful, combining love poems with political satire, elegies with family portraits; he also writes poems of surprising eroticism which arise from his questioning of clerical oppression. The selection includes translation from Acallam na Senórach, the medieval anthology of Irish stories and poems, including the haunting 'Créde's Lament', and from work by the contemporary Galician poet, Ana RomanÃ, including the compelling 'Would That the Sperm Whales Would Climb My Legs...'. Throughout this selection there is evidence of that poetic intelligence and meticulous technique that make Harmon's work both satisfying and worthy of celebration.

From Paul Perry, The Irish Times: 'Harmon displays an ability to combine tenderness and pathos with a fiercely unsentimental honesty ... his distinctive talent is for the sustained narrative of memory.'

Maurice Harmon

Maurice Harmon, a distinguished academic, literary critic and scholar, has published studies of Irish writers from William Carleton to Seán O'Faoláin, Mary Lavin, and Benedict Kiely, from Austin Clarke to Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, and Dennis O’Driscoll. Harmon’s career as editor-founder of the Irish University Review and his publications, including Sean O’Faolain: A Life, 1994; the ground-breaking anthology, Irish Poetry after Yeats, 1979; Selected Essays, 2006; Thomas Kinsella: Designing for the Exact Needs, 2008; with The Dialogue of the Ancients of Ireland, his translation of Accalam na Senórach, the medieval compendium of stories and poems, 2009, among others, affirm him as one of the elect. His reputation as a poet has grown with the publication of the stylish and humane Loose Connections (Salmon, 2012) and the compassionate Hoops of Holiness (Salmon, 2016). afterwords (Salmon, 2020) is his seventh collection.