08 Jan 2007

Internationally-Renowned Poet to deliver Annual Yeats Lecture at UCC

The fifth annual UCC WB Yeats Lecture will be delivered by Poet, Professor Paul Muldoon in UCC on Tuesday, 16 January.

Paul Muldoon whose lecture is titled "Moving Upon Silence: Yeats and the Refrain" is currently Howard GB Clark Professor of the Humanities and Creative Writing at Princeton University.  Born in Portadown, County Armagh in 1951, he read English at Queen's University, Belfast, where he was taught by Seamus Heaney. His first collection of poems, New Weather, was published in 1973, while he was still at university. He worked for the BBC in Belfast until 1986, before taking up a writer's residency at Cambridge University. He moved to the USA shortly afterwards to teach at Columbia and Princeton universities. He became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1999, succeeding James Fenton, and is currently President of the Poetry Society in London.

His poetry collections include Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, The Annals of Chile (1994), which includes an elegy to the artist Mary Farl Powers and won the TS Eliot Prize, and Hay (1998). New Selected Poems 1968-1994 (1996) won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry. He is editor of The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986) and wrote the libretto for Shining Brow (1993), an opera about the life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright with music by Daron Aric Hagen. He delivered the Oxford Clarendon Lectures in 1988, published as To Ireland, I (2000), and his translation of poems in Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was published in The Astrakhan Cloak (1992). The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures in Poetry (2006), contains the lectures he delivered during his tenure as Oxford Professor of Poetry.

His most recent book of poetry, Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Sponsored by ESB International and hosted by UCC, the WB Yeats lecture series has featured such notable international Yeats scholars as Roy Foster, Bernard O'Donoghue and Professor Helen Vendler.  The lecture series, an initiative of the Library and the Department of English at UCC, was inspired by the acquisition in 2002 of a large collection of WB Yeats first editions by the UCC Library as a gift from UCC Engineering alumnus and Yeats scholar, Dr Eamonn Cantwell.
 
The lecture will take place at UCC in the Boole II Lecture Theatre at 3pm on Tuesday, 16 January.  Members of the public are particularly welcome and admission is free.

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