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06/06/2025

Thanks to everyone who attended last night’s launch for The Meek by Martin Dyar and Tickle by Eithne Hand. If you missed the reading, you can still find some signed copies at Hodges Figgis!

Stay tuned for future events.

06/03/2025

Meet Martin Dyar! Martin will read from his newest collection, The Meek, this Thursday at Hodges Figgis in Dublin, 6 pm.

Originally from Swinford in County Mayo, Martin Dyar is the author of the Pigott Prize-shortlisted poetry collection Maiden Names (Arlen House, 2013) and The Meek (WFU Press, 2025). He has written a play, Tom Loves a Lord, about the Irish poet Thomas Moore; and, with the composer Ryan Molloy, a poetry song cycle (a suite for soprano, harp, and flute), titled Buaine na Gaoithe, which had an Irish national tour in 2018. He is also the editor of the anthology Vital Signs: Poems of Illness and Healing (Poetry Ireland, 2022). A Vital Signs poetry and music tour, which visited care homes and mental health facilities across Ireland, was produced by the Festival in a Van company in 2023.

The winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, the Strokestown International Poetry Award, and the recipient of an Irish Arts Council Literature Bursary Award, Dyar has held writing fellowships at the University of Iowa, the Washington Ireland Program, and at the University of Limerick. He teaches in the field of Medical Humanities in the School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin.

📷: Ger Holland

05/30/2025

Poem of the week: "The Shannon Reader" by Martin Dyar, from The Meek (2025). Read the full poem on the WFU Press blog: https://wfupress.wfu.edu/poem-of-the-week/the-shannon-reader-by-martin-dyar/

In her selection of this week's poem, WFU Press intern Melina Traiforos writes, "Creative genius is often characterized by 'eureka!' moments of inspiration, but in 'The Shannon Reader,' Martin Dyar explores the ritualistic side of the poetic process. His structure is repetitive—never straying from two-line stanzas of about equal length—just like the author in the poem’s sacred writing ritual. Her labor is not immediately fruitful, but with time and patience, it 'sweetened and deepened' with ripeness."

05/29/2025

Come celebrate the Dublin launch of The Meek by Martin Dyar and Tickle by Eithne Hand at Hodges Figgis on Thursday, June 5th, at 6 pm! Speakers will include Gerard Stembridge and Jane Clarke.

05/09/2025

Poem of the week: “Christmas Eve 1950” by Thomas Kinsella. Read it in The Irish Times: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2022/12/24/christmas-eve-1950-by-thomas-kinsella/

Where Love and Imagination Colour the Dark, our new book of essays on Thomas Kinsella, is named after lines from this early uncollected poem, originally written in the 1950s. Kinsella returned to this poem in the last year of his life, and it was eventually published in Last Poems (Carcanet, 2023).

05/07/2025

Take a look through the table of contents for our new book of essays on Thomas Kinsella, published this month to celebrate what would have been his 97th birthday: https://bit.ly/4m4Z5MZ

Edited by Adrienne Leavy, this collection features twelve essays by celebrated poets and academics alike, offering a balance of high-quality criticism and more personal perspectives, at once scholarly and accessible.

05/06/2025

Available now: Where Love and Imagination Colour the Dark | Essays on Thomas Kinsella, edited by Adrienne Leavy. Learn more and order your copy on our website here: https://wfupress.wfu.edu/books/where-love-and-imagination-colour-the-dark-essays-on-thomas-kinsella/

Where Love and Imagination Colour the Dark establishes a broad interdisciplinary context in which to consider the work of Thomas Kinsella, one of the most significant poets in modern Irish and international poetry. Not only is Kinsella’s remarkable poetic corpus the subject of several essays, his critical writings and achievements as a translator and anthologist of Gaelic literature are also considered, in particular his groundbreaking translation of the Irish vernacular epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, published to great critical acclaim by the Dolmen Press in 1969.

This collection of twelve essays by some of the finest poets and scholars of contemporary Irish poetry provides a detailed reading of the themes and forms throughout Kinsella’s remarkable career. Beginning with several chapters devoted to assessing the aesthetic importance of Kinsella’s native Dublin, this volume traces the evolution of the poet’s work from the early formalism of the 1950s through the Jungian-inspired explorations of the psyche, his fascination with personal origins and Irish mythology, and the open-ended sequences that characterized his mature poetry. The central role of Kinsella’s Peppercanister Press from both a creative and artistic perspective is also explored, as is the fundamental importance of Kinsella’s wife Eleanor, his partner and Muse for more than sixty years.

Edited by Adrienne Leavy. Essays by Brian Caraher, Lucy Collins, Alex Davis, Gerald Dawe, Andrew Fitzsimons, Paul Gosling, Hugh Haughton, Adrienne Leavy, Mary O’Malley, Thomas Dillon Redshaw, Gerard Smyth, and Derval Tubridy.

05/02/2025

May is here, and so is The Meek by Martin Dyar. To celebrate both, our poem of the week is "The May Baby," translated from a version of a traditional Irish song collected in County Monaghan by Henry Morris. Read the full poem on the WFU Press blog here: https://wfupress.wfu.edu/poem-of-the-week/the-may-baby-by-martin-dyar/

In her selection of this week's poem, WFU Press intern Mary Outland writes, "Dyar paints the portrait of the 'May girl,' who seamlessly blends into this background of honey, doves, blossoms, and herons. 'The May Baby' is infused with hope, drawing upon themes of connection and community across humanity and nature."

05/01/2025

Cheers to our wonderful interns this year: Paulina, Madeline, Melina, Mary, and Virginia! Our books are better because of your hard work. You are so bright and talented, and we can’t wait to see where the future takes you!

Last night, we capped off the year with pints, pizza, and bar trivia. And, we’re very proud to say, we aced the Shakespeare round (just don’t ask how we fared with the football questions!)

04/29/2025

Available now: The Meek by Martin Dyar. Learn more and order your copy on our website: https://wfupress.wfu.edu/books/the-meek/

True voices abound in The Meek, Martin Dyar’s second full-length collection of poems, throughout which a dramatically charged lyricism links environmental understanding with an emotive exploration of human experience and potential.

The Meek is distinguished by the resonance and range of its stories, by its closeness to elemental landscape and wildlife, and by its moments of unforgettable insight and beauty. In one poem, “A Lockdown Fox,” “The whole street felt acknowledged by the earth and longed for more.” Elsewhere, in “A Merlin in the Sheeffrys,” “There is a feeling that is equal to the land, / a sense of self that is the journey’s length.” And in the title sonnet, a powerful consideration of animal rights, one of Dyar’s bruised and enigmatic characters arrives at “a cold acceptance of nature’s cold view / that all of life is love misunderstood.”

04/11/2025

Poem of the Week: "Míreanna Mearaí / Jigsaw" by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, from Lunulae: New & Selected Poems in Translation. Read the full poem in Irish and English on the WFU Press blog: https://wfupress.wfu.edu/poem-of-the-week/jigsaw-by-doireann-ni-ghriofa/

In her selection of this week's poem, WFU Press intern Mary Outland writes, "Doireann Ní Ghríofa draws the reader into the physical and psychological complexities of motherhood. Using bodily descriptions and an emphasis on personal experience, Ní Ghríofa contrasts the feelings of uncertainty and anticipation that accompany sensing a baby wriggling in the womb with the settledness and comfort of a mother knowing her child. By positioning the child as a 'little stranger' who, once born, exhibits a form of innate and almost predestined belonging to the mother, much like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, the final line of the poem lifts the reader with a feeling of hope for the future of this pair."

04/09/2025

This Friday, April 11, Professor Thomas Dillon Redshaw and Dr. Adrienne Leavy will present a talk on the poet Thomas Kinsella at the McClelland Library Irish Cultural Center in Phoenix, Arizona. This talk will also introduce a new study of Kinsella’s work, Where Love and Imagination Colour the Dark: Essays on Thomas Kinsella, which will be published by Wake Forest University Press in May 2025.

Learn more and register for free here: https://www.azirish.org/library-lecture-series/

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