A Uachtarán na hOllscoile, a dhaoine uaisle agus a mhuintir na hOllscoile President of UCC, Distinguished Guests, colleagues, graduates   Maureen McLane hears voices and sees spirits in the air. Thanks to her poetry and prose, we too can share in her exceptional powers of sound and sight. And if that makes the work sound rather offputtingly grand, she also deploys a dizzingly diverse range of tonal registers and a deeply ironic sense of humour. Her voice has been described as landing ‘somewhere between teenage fangirl and Wordsworth professor’, which is a way of saying that Maureen’s McLane’s own vernacular and contemporary voice is inflected at every point by her ‘reading, teaching, writing and conversing about Anglophone poetries, 1750ish to now’ (her own, characteristically laconic, description).