London & Oxford Launches Micheal O’Siadhail’s Collected Poems

Collected Poems is a substantial retrospective covering almost 40 years of work. It draws on thirteen books of poetry by Micheal O’Siadhail, and includes a CD of him reading a selection of the poems.

In his foreword, Micheal O’Siadhail writes about the individual books that make up his Collected, drawing out common themes and relating the books to the various stages in his life at which they were written.
“Collected poems are a kind of retrospective symphony. There was no grand plan. Different phases of growth, the various exigencies in the theatre of living call up the movements.” - Micheal O’Siadhail, Foreword to his Collected Poem.
 
Micheal O’Siadhail is one of Ireland’s leading poets. Formerly a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and a professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, he has been a full-time writer since 1987. He has published thirteen books of poetry, the last nine from Bloodaxe, including Hail! Madam Jazz: New and Selected Poems (1992), Our Double Time (1998), Poems 1975-1995 (1999), The Gossamer Wall: poems in witness to the Holocaust (2002), Love Life (2005), Globe (2007) and Tongues (2010). He won the Marten Toonder Prize for Literature in 1998. He has given poetry readings and broadcast extensively in Ireland, Britain, continental Europe, North America and Japan. He lives in Dublin.

Collected Poems by Micheal O’Siadhail is published by Bloodaxe Books, price £20 (paper) and £30 (cased). With free audio CD of poems read by Micheal O'Siadhail.

For further information on Micheal O’Siadhail, please visit http://osiadhail.com/

Bloodaxe Books archive returns to Newcastle University

Thirty-five years ago poetry lover Neil Astley set up his own publishing house from an admin office on the Newcastle University campus. From these humble beginnings, Bloodaxe Books would become one of the most important contemporary poetry publishers in the world, giving a voice and in many cases a break, to leading writers, including Simon Armitage, Helen Dunmore, Tony Harrison and Benjamin Zephaniah; major figures in world poetry such as Mahmoud Darwish, Miroslav Holub and Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer; and Newcastle University’s own Bill Herbert, Jackie Kay and Sean O’Brien.
Now, three and half decades later the university has acquired its archive and Bloodaxe Books is returning to the place where it all began. The university has just taken delivery of the first part of the archive and is starting the long task of cataloguing it. It is hoped that the archive will be available for reference within two years.

For more information, see www.ncl.ac.uk/ncla.

Source: New Writing North