Irish Poets To Read This St. Patrick's Day
W.B. Yeats
W.B. Yeasts is considered one of Ireland’s greatest poets.
The Rose Of The World
W.B. Yeats
WHO dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna’s children died.
We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats contains all of Yeats authorized poems, reworkings of ancient Irish myths and fables. Included in this collected is
The Celtic Twilight, collection of myths and fairytales , written by Yeats.
Theo Dorgan
A Slow Poem
I place my finger with great care
on the sleeping magnificent body of my beloved.
The room is quiet and huge, the air still, so still
I hear dustmotes falling like leaves on the counterpane.
read more here.
Eavan Boland
Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1944. She became one of the most prominent female voices in Irish Literature. She published over a dozen volumes of poetry, including In A Time of Violence ( Norton 1995), A Woman Without A Country, (2016), Against Love: Poetry (2003) , and many more. In addition, she edited a terrific poetry craft book with Mark Strand, and published several non-fiction books, as well.
Heroic
Sex and history. And skin and bone.
And the oppression of Sunday afternoon.
Bells called the faithful to devotion.
I was still at school and on my own.
And walked and walked and sheltered from the rain.
read more here.
This poem is found in In A Time of Violence.
Marie Howe
What The Silence Said
Do you still believe in borders now?
Birds soar over your maps and walls, and always have.
You might have watched how the smoke from your own fires
travelled on wind you couldn’t see
wafting over the valley
and up and over the hills and over the next valley and the next hill.
…. read more here.
Patrick Kavanagh
Patrick Kavanagh was born in Inniskeen, County Monaghan, in October 1904. His poetry collections include Ploughman and Other Poems (1936), A Soul for Sale (1947), and Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960). He also wrote the novel Tarry Flynn (1948) and an early autobiography, The Green Fool (1938). He died in Dublin in November 1967.
Wet Evening In April
by Patrick Kavanagh
The birds sang in the wet trees
And I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy.
Selected Poems Patrick Kavanagh, edited by Paul Muldoon, includes “The Great Hunger” which is considered one of Kavanagh’s greatest poems, along a selection of his best known poems, and more.
