Gabriel Fitzmaurice has been described as “the best contemporary, traditional, popular poet in English” in Booklist, “a wonderful poet” in the Guardian, “one of Ireland’s leading poets … a master of his art” in Books Ireland and “the Irish A.A. Milne” in the Sunday Tribune. In Gabriel Fitzmaurice: The Poet and His Work, eleven leading writers and scholars from Ireland, Scotland, Hungary and the USA examine Fitzmaurice’s extensive oeuvre, his poetry in English and Irish for adults and for children and his translations from the Irish, in essays that are as lucid as they are perceptive.
Covering a lifetime of creativity, they celebrate a writer who has been hailed as “the people’s poet” in the Irish Independent, “one of our leading translators of Irish poetry into English” in the Irish Catholic and “poetry’s answer to John B. Keane” by poet and critic Fred Johnston. Gabriel Fitzmaurice: The Poet and His Work, edited by Jessie Lendennie, features contributions from Paddy Bushe, Micheal de Mordha, Gyozo Ferencz, Tom Hubbard, James J. Kennelly, Mary Kennelly, Declan Kiberd, Eilis Ní Dhuibhne, Bernard O’Donoghue, Jo Slade and Alan Titley.
GABRIEL FITZMAURICE was born, in 1952, in the village of Moyvane, Co. Kerry where he still lives. For over thirty years he taught in the local primary school from which he retired as principal in 2007. He is author of more than sixty books, including collections of poetry in English and Irish as well as several collections of verse for children. He has translated extensively from the Irish and has edited a number of anthologies of poetry in English and Irish. He has published volumes of essays and collections of songs and ballads. Poems of his have been set to music and recorded by Brian Kennedy and performed by the RTÉ Cór na nÓg with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. An Honorary Member of the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts in Hungary, he is a recipient of the Listowel Writers’ Week John B. Keane Lifetime Achievement Award. He frequently broadcasts on radio and television on culture and the arts.
Excerpt from Alan Titley's essay, "Gabriel Fitzmaurice: Troubadour":
"Among contemporary poets… Gabriel Fitzmaurice is almost unique in following Yeats’s advice ‘to sing whatever is well-made.’ There are others, of course, but much current poetry as we know sags and wilts across the page leaving deserts of white sand turning worse libre against itself. He believes in the shape and the cut of a poem as a statement which is carved out of the language but hammered lovingly into a pattern. He seems to be old-fashioned enough to say ‘there must be rhythm, there must be rhyme, there must be thrust, the poem must say something.’ That is to say, a poem should do all those things that poetry ever did and not hide its virtues...."
