     |
RELEASED: Oct. 2, 2003
DANVILLE, KY—The Centre College English program will present a free poetry reading by one of Ireland's leading poets, Medbh McGuckian, on Oct. 8 at 8 p.m. in the Norton Center Board Room.
Born in Belfast in 1950, McGuckian is linked with the generation of Northern Irish poets who followed in the wake of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize-winning poet. McGuckian, in fact, studied with Heaney at Queen's College in Belfast, where she now teaches.
McGuckian's poems can be described as intensely personal, often focusing on femininity, motherhood and family relationships.
Heaney said, "Her language is like the inner lining of consciousness, the inner lining of English itself, and it moves amphibiously between the dreamlife and her actual domestic and historical experience as a woman in late-twentieth-century Ireland."
Noted for what one critic has called the "hypnotic oddness" of her verse, McGuckian herself, comments, "My words are traps through which you pick your way."
McGuckian's volumes include Drawing Ballerinas, Shelmalier, Captain Lavender, Marconi's Cottage, On Ballycastle Beach, Venus and the Rain, and The Flower Master. Her work has been anthologized in numerous collections, including The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry.
Prizes awarded to McGuckian include the Poetry Society's Alice Hunt-Bartlett Award, the National Poetry Competition, the Cheltenham Award, the Rooney Prize for Literature, the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the Eric Gregory Award, and the Irelands Funds Literary Award.
- end -
For news archives go to http://www.centre.edu/web/news/newsarchive.html.
Communications Office
Centre College
600 W. Walnut Street
Danville, KY 40422
Public Information Coordinator: Telephone 859-238-5714