POETRY READING & DISCUSSIONSponsored by Poetry Ireland, Dublin
Thursday, May 8, 8:15 p.m., Newcomb Hall Ballroom
A celebration of language, voice, feeling, and perception, this reading and discussion features Irish poets Ciaran Carson, Paula Meehan, Cathal O Searcaigh, and Theo Dorgan, who will moderate.

Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast. He worked in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998, with responsibility for Traditional Music, and, more latterly, Literature. He is now a full-time writer. Carson is the author of eight collections of poems, including The Irish for No, Belfast Confetti, and The Twelfth of Never. In recent years he has written four prose books: Last Night’s Fun, a book about traditional music; The Star Factory, a memoir of Belfast; Fishing for Amber: A Long Story; and Shamrock Tea, a novel, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. He has won several literary awards, including The Irish Times Irish Literature Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His translation of Dante’s Inferno was published by Granta Books in November 2002, and a book of new poems, Breaking News, by Gallery Press and Wake Forest University Press in April 2003.

Paula Meehan’s Dharmakaya (2000) won the Denis Devlin Memorial Award of the Irish Arts Council. Her other volumes include Mysteries of the Home (1991), Pillow Talk (1994), and The Man Who Was Marked By Winter (1991), both of which were short-listed for the Irish Times Irish Literature Award. A member of Aosdána, Ireland’s Senate of the Arts, Meehan has received the Butler Award for Poetry from the Irish American Cultural Institute and the Marten Toonder Award for Literature.

Cathal O Searcaigh, who writes in Irish about the countryside in Donegal, where he lives, has been translated by Seamus Heaney, among others. His translated collections include Suibhne (“Sweeney”), An Bealach ‘na Bhaile (“Homecoming”) (1993), and Out in the Open (1997). He is described by The Irish Times as one of Ireland’s “finest working poets.”

Theo Dorgan is author of The Ordinary House of Love (1991), Rosa Mundi (1995), and Sappho's Daughter (1998). The former Director of Poetry Ireland, he is a broadcaster and presenter with RTE radio and television. He is editor of Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh (1996), and co-editor of The Great Book of Ireland (1991), Revising the Rising (1991) Watching The River Flow (2000), and The Great Book of Gaelic (2002).

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