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Irish Poetry

Ireland: A Quilt of Many Patches and Colors

By Kelly Candaele
IA Newsletter August 26, 2023

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It is somehow fitting that the Good Friday Peace Agreement of 1998 has become inseparable from Irish poetry. If, for a moment, “hope and history rhymed” or those involved in resolving the conflict “walked on air against their better judgment,” politicians and other speechifiers have poet Seamus Heaney to thank for their grab-bag of metaphorical phrases. In an earlier era of … [Read more...] about Ireland: A Quilt of Many Patches and Colors

Absolutely Beautiful

By Irish America Staff
December / January 2002

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Enter any bookstore, be it mom and pop or chain retailer, and there are sure to be stacks upon stacks of coffee table books with Irish photographs. But now comes one so lovely it seems more suited for an auction house than a coffee table. Gerald Hoberman has produced a book of breathtaking photographs that he took throughout the isle and has paired them with the informative and … [Read more...] about Absolutely Beautiful

Yeats Country and Beyond

By Emer Mullins, Contributor
February/March 2001

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"I am of Ireland," wrote William Butler Yeats in one of his most famous poems from 1933, and all we have to do is look at the stark images from the land where he lived and from which he absorbed his genius and his inspiration to know that this is true. Few poets have identified so strongly with the Irish landscape as Yeats; few poets have such heavenly imagery at their … [Read more...] about Yeats Country and Beyond

The Bearing of the Green

By Pete Hamill, Contributor
October / November 2000

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Some thoughts on being Irish-American. As a proud Irish-American, I begin with a simple assumption: there is no way to precisely define that elusive, complex human category called the Irish-American. The tools of sociology are as inadequate to the task as the forms of the Census Bureau, and the jeweler's art of the lexicographer can't come close to an answer. This should … [Read more...] about The Bearing of the Green

Seamus Heaney Poetic Champion

By Patricia Harty, Editor-in-Chief & Kate O'Callaghan, Contributor
October / November 2000

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A native of Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. The following excerpts are taken from interviews conducted with him in 1986 and shortly after he won the Nobel in 1996. Poetry summons you. That's been my own experience. The real difficulty about being a poet is not in the writing. It's surviving the silence, surviving lack of … [Read more...] about Seamus Heaney Poetic Champion