Joseph Woods, Luis García Montero & Paul Farley
Friday 25th March at 6.30pm €14/10/8
Joseph Woods
Joseph Woods was born in Drogheda in 1966. He studied
biology and chemistry, holds an MA in Poetry from Lancaster
University, and has worked as a chemist, a teacher and directorof studies in a language school. Since 2001, he has beenDirector of Poetry Ireland. Widely travelled, he has lived in Japan and Asia. For his first book Sailing to Hokkaido (Worple Press, 2001), he received the Patrick Kavanagh Award. His second collection, Bearings, was published in 2005, and with Irene de Angelis, he co-edited an anthology of contemporary Irish poetry relating to Japan, Our Shared Japan (Dedalus Press, 2007). Dedalus last year reissued his first two books in a single volume, Cargo, and will publish his third collection, Ocean Letters, this year.
“Woods can’t help but evince his deep and extensive
engagement with contemporary poetry. Wide-ranging but subtle effects suggest there’s much held in reserve here;
and more to come.”
Fiona Sampson
Luis García Montero
Considered one of the most important poets writing in Spanish
today, Luis García Montero was born in Granada in 1958. Since his debut collection El jardin extranjero (Hyperion,1983), which won the Adonais Prize, he has published over twenty books of poetry and several collections of essays. A leading proponent of the Spanish “poetry of experience”, he won the Loewe Award and Spain’s National Poetry Prize for Habitaciones separadas (Visor, 1994). For his collection La intimidad de la serpiente (Tusquets, 2003), he received both the National Poetry Critics Prize and Granada’s Gold Medal.
He is Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Granada and has written a column for El Pais. His collection So Many Times the World will appear later this year from Salt Publishing, in a translation by Victor Rodriguez. At dlr Poetry Now, he will read his poems with the poet and translator Martin Veiga.
“Sustained tone, powerful nostalgia, delicate emotion that
does not raise its voice, concise, tight poetry. Luis García
Montero represents one of the most valuable trends of
Spanish poetry”
Octavio Paz
Paul Farley
Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965 and studied at the
Chelsea School of Art. He won the Arvon Poetry Competition
in 1996 and his first collection of poetry, The Boy from the
Chemist is Here to See You (Picador, 1998), won the Forward
Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, among other awards. In
2003, The Ice Age was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and
won the Whitbread Poetry Award. Further works include Trampin Flames (Picador, 2006), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, and The Atlantic Tunnel: Selected Poems (Faber, 2010).
His book with Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys
into England’s Last Wilderness (Cape, 2010), won the Jerwood
Prize for Non-Fiction. He is Professor of Poetry at Lancaster
University.
“One of the most disarmingly original poets now writing.”
The Sunday Times