2007 Press Releases
"Life, Consciousness and Gaia: Reflections on the Work of James Lovelock"
"Agee seems to have hit that fine balance between allusiveness and
clarity, and formal control and spontaneity, that so few poets manage
to achieve these days" said Don Paterson referring to "First Light" by
author Chris Agee who will deliver the next lecture in the Faculty of
Science Public Lecture Series at UCC.
At the next lecture which will take place on Wednesday, 21 March, Chris
Agee will discuss the two seminal works of James Lovelock, Gaia and The
Revenge of Gaia. Whilst recently re-reading the former Chris Agee says
he was struck not only by the prescience of the atmospheric chemistry,
but his fascinating discussion about the absence of a satisfactory
scientific answer to the question of "what is life? "It is this
line of thought that I would like to give especial consideration
(though not all in relation to the sense of the phrase in the embryo
debate), connecting as it does with some of my bio-tech
preoccupations in The Earth Issue. I also noticed the strongly
contrarian streak in the earlier book and would like to analyse how
this continues in the newer one" said Mr Agee.
Chris Agee was born in 1956 in San Francisco and grew up in
Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. He attended Harvard
University, where he studied with the poet and translator Robert
Fitzgerald. Since 1979 he has lived in Ireland. He is the author of two
books of poems, In the New Hampshire Woods (The Dedalus Press, 1992)
and First Light (The Dedalus Press, 2003). A former guest editor of
Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry (Chicago) and Metre, he also edited Scar
on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia (Bloodaxe Books, 1998,
Poetry Book Society Recommendation) and Unfinished Ireland: Essays on
Hubert Butler (Irish Pages, 2003). His work is included in the landmark
Northern anthology, Magnetic North: The Emerging Poets (Lagan Press,
2006). He now edits Irish Pages, a journal of contemporary writing
based at The Linen Hall Library, Belfast. He reviews regularly for The
Irish Times and has recently completed a new collection of poems, Next
to Nothing.
The lecture takes place at UCC's Boole Lecture Theatre 4 at 8pm on
Wednesday, 21 March. The highly popular lecture series, organised
by Professor William Reville of the Faculty of Science, UCC, continues
weekly until 28 March 2007. Admission to the lecture is free, and
as always, members of the public are invited to attend.
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