There was a Grand Parade of contemporary Irish poets at the launch of The Deep Heart’s Core at Cork City Library on Wednesday night.
Edited by poets, Kiskeam native, Eugene O’Connell and Pat Boran from Portlaoise, the anthology takes the pulse of the state of poetry in Ireland today.
Kerry poetry and poets are well represented in the 105 or so who accepted the challenge and made the cut.
Runs to 318 Pages
The Dedalus Press published anthology runs to all of 318 pages and was launched by one of Ireland’s poetic heavyweights and North Cork native, Bernard O’Donoghue.
Bernard O’Donoghue, who also wrote the foreword for the publication, was born in Cullen, Co Cork. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, where he taught Medieval English and Modern Irish Poetry.
He has published six collections of poetry and is a winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize for Poetry and his 2016 published The Seasons of Cullen Church has also been shortlisted for the 2017 Pigott Poetry Prize at this year’s Listowel Writers’ Week.
Kerry Poets at Launch
Scartaglin native and much in demand poet, Eileen Sheehan is included as is Killarney’s Breda Joy with Gabriel Fitzmaurice from Moyvane and John W. Sexton from Kenmare.
These Kerry poets all read their work at the gathering in the Grand Parade venue on launch night. However, the anthology also includes the work of other Kerry writers like: Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, Brendan Kennelly, John Moriarty, Paddy Bushe and Noel King.
Though it was a night on which the stars of the literary world burned brightly, there was a man among them whose fame also goes before him.
The now Co. Cork based photographer, John Minihan, who famously photographed Samuel Beckett and Princess Diana – among many others, was mingling with his Olympus Pen at the ready.
The publishers’ note on the book is as follows:
In our new anthology, The Deep Heart’s Core: Irish Poets Revisit a Touchstone Poem, over 100 poets accept the invitation to revisit a favourite, key or touchstone poem of their own, and offer a short commentary on same — as they might at a live event.
The result is an illuminating, thought-provoking and wholly engaging volume, a unique anthology as selected by the poets themselves, and a rare glimpse into the thinking, feeling and craft behind the finished poems.
The Deep Heart’s Core is both an ideal introduction to contemporary Irish poetry for the general reader and a handbook for the aspiring practitioner or student.
The Deep Heart’s Core is edited by Pat Boran and Eugene O’Connell and features a foreword by Bernard O’Donoghue.
.. and from RTÉ:
The Deep Heart’s Core — whose subtitle is Irish Poets Revisit A Touchstone Poem — is a work of unbounded riches, and the reader cannot help but be engaged by the wonderful play of poem against prose. There is the sense of a poem bedded down in some other era, the poet as the survivor of the incident who walked away, to find rueful, or blissful, or conflicted memories in the poem’s afterlife, as he,or she, exhumes again for the purposes of the anthology … [A]n essential collection for lovers of contemporary Irish poetry. — RTÉ TEN
…and Dermot Bolger
“The book contains an eclectically democratic mix of familiar and unfamiliar voices. If you want to discover a raft of new Irish poets and a sense of what inspires them, this anthology is a unique read, crammed with revelations.”
—Dermot Bolger, Sunday Business Post.
For further information click on the link here. https://dedaluspress.com/the-deep-hearts-core
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