Se n R ord in (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' (Gear id Denvir). Many of R ord in'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. R ord in'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 R ord in'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 R ord in 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. Se n R ord in 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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Published: 04/20/2021
ISBN: 9781780375366
Pages: 176