Seán Ó Ríordáin (1916-77) was the most important and most influential Irish-language poet of modern times. He revitalised poetry in Irish, combining the world of Irish literature with that of modern English and European literature, thus adding to the Irish tradition from the other side. His poems ‘seek to answer fundamental questions about the nature of human existence and the place of the individual in a universe without meaning’ (Gearóid Denvir). Many of Ó Ríordáin’s poems came out of his struggle with the isolation, guilt and loneliness of life in mid-century Catholic Ireland experienced in Cork, the native locale also of the poet Greg Delanty, translator of Apathy Is Out. Ó Ríordáin’s poems have been translated by many poets, but until now no single writer has translated the majority of the poems. This collection gives a much more unified sense of Ó Ríordáin’s work, catching the poetry’s verve, playfulness and range and also ‘the music you still hear in Munster, /even in places where it has gone under’. It includes the dark, sorrowful poems Ó Ríordáin has usually represented with in anthologies but also poems of exuberance and celebration, notably ‘Tulyar’, one of the funniest satirical critiques of the Irish Church’s attitude to sex which matches any similar attack by Patrick Kavanagh or Austin Clarke. Seán Ó Ríordáin renewed poetry in Irish by writing out of the modernist sense of alienation, fragmentation and identity, but he also saw beyond Modernism’s confines to the connective matrix of our world.
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Greg Delanty was born in Cork in 1958, and studied at University College Cork. He has lived in the US for the past 30 years, and is a professor of English at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont. He has edited or co-edited several anthologies and translations, including Jumping Off Shadows: Selected Contemporary Irish Poetry (with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, 1995), Selected Poems: Kyriakos Charalambides (2005), The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (with Michael Matto, 2011), and Apathy Is Out: Selected Poems by Seán Ó Ríordáin (Bloodaxe Books / Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2021). His own Collected Poems 1986-2006 (Carcanet Press, 2006) draws on seven collections, including Cast in the Fire (1986), Southward (1992), American Wake (1995), The Hellbox (1998), The Blind Stitch (2001), The Ship of Birth (2003), and a new collection, Aceldama. His inventive “translation” of imagined poets, The Greek Anthology, Book XVII (Carcanet Press, 2012), features poets including Kincellas Major, Longlius, Rosanna Daedalus, Clara Kritikos and a certain Heanius. His latest poetry book to appear in the US is Selected Delanty, selected and introduced by Archie Burnett (Un-Gyve Press, 2017). He has received many awards, including a Guggenheim for poetry.
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