Four Irish Poets / Quatre poètes irlandais

Clíona Ní Ríordáin is Professor of English at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, where she teaches Irish literature and translation studies and convenes the Master’s programme in Irish Studies. She holds degrees from the National University of Ireland and from the universities of Lyons and Paris. Her research interests lie in contemporary Irish poetry, and sociolinguistics. She directs the Irish Studies research group, ERIN. Her most recent publication is the bilingual anthology Jeune Poésie d’Irlande (Illador, 2015), co-edited and translated with Paul Bensimon. She is the editor of Four Irish Poets / Quatre poètes irlandais, a bilingual (English/French) selection of the work of four Irish poets: Pat Boran, Katherine Duffy, Mary Montague and Gerry Murphy, with translations by Anne Mounic, Paul Bensimon, Yves Lefevre and Isabelle Génin.

GERRY MURPHY is an Irish poet, born in Cork in 1952. His poetry collections include A Small Fat Boy Walking Backwards (1985, 1992) and five previous collections from Dedalus, Rio de la Plata and All That (1993), The Empty Quarter (1995), Extracts from the Lost Log-Book of Christopher Columbus (1999), Torso of an Ex-Girlfriend (2002), My Flirtation with International Socialism (2010) and Muse (2015) His latest collection is The Humours of Nothingness (2020). Dedalus also published End of Part One: New and Selected Poems (2006). He has published two chapbooks with Southword Editions. Murphy's poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry Ireland Review, The Well Review and The Future (Arlen House, 2018). Pocket Apocalypse, his translations of the Polish poet Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska, appeared in 2005 from Southword Editions. Murphy's own poems form the basis for a live poetry-and-music show by Crazy Dog Audio Theatre, entitled The People's Republic of Gerry Murphy, which ran at the Cork Guinness Jazz Festival in 2010 to considerable critical success. REVIEW EXCERPT "Murphy's voice is salacious, funny, pithy, angry-making, often verging on the side-of-the-mouth and, dare one add, tender... This is a worthwhile book, energetic and wise." — Fred Johnston, Poetry Ireland Review

KATHERINE DUFFY was born in Dundalk, Co. Louth, a town just south of the Irish border, in 1962. She has lived in Dublin for most of her life, working first as a librarian and later as a parliamentary translator in the Houses of the Oireachtas. She writes both poetry and fiction. Katherine Duffy’s poetry publications include the collections The Erratic Behaviour of Tides (Dedalus Press, 1998) and Sorrow’s Egg (Dedalus Press, 2011). Talking the Owl Away (Templar Poetry, 2018) won Templar’s 2018 Iota Shot Pamphlet Award. Translations into French of poems from Sorrow’s Egg were included in Quatre poètes irlandais (Dedalus Press, 2011), launched on Bloomsday 2011 at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. Other work of hers has been anthologised in various selections over the years, most recently in The Word Ark (Dedalus Press, 2020) and Places of Poetry (Oneworld, 2020). Katherine Duffy writes fiction in both English and Irish. Short stories of hers have won the Hennessy New Writer of the Year award, several Oireachtas na Gaeilge awards, third place in the RTE Short Story Competition and have been included in Best European Fiction 2018 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017). Katherine Duffy is also an accomplished translator. She has translated the work of leading Irish language writers into English. Rambling Jack (Dalkey Archive Press, 2015) is her translation of the acclaimed novella Seachrán Jeaic Sheáin Johnny by Mícheál Ó Conghaile. Her translations, commissioned by Cló Iar-Chonnacht, of stories by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, are due to appear in a collection from Yale University Press in 2021. Her website address is:  www.kateduv.com

MARY MONTAGUE was born in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh in 1964. She currently lives in Belfast, where she works as a facilitator of creative writing and a tutor of science at Queen’s University. She is a biologist by background with a Master’s degree in Animal Behaviour, and a PhD in birdsong. Mary Montague has published two collections of poetry, Black Wolf on a White Plain (Summer Palace Press, 2001), and Tribe (Dedalus Press, 2008). Tribe was published in Italian as Tribù in 2014 by Edizioni Kolibris. Her poetry has also been translated into French and Russian. Mary Montague’s work has featured in numerous anthologies, including: The Word Ark: A Pocket Book of Animal Poems, illustrated by the Sicilian artist Gaetano Tranchino (Dedalus Press 2020); Reading the Future (edited by Alan Hayes, Arlen House, 2018); and Science Meets Poetry 3 (edited by Jean-Patrick Connerade & Iggy McGovern, Euroscience Press, Strasbourg, 2013). Mary’s work has benefited from a Poetry Ireland Tyrone Guthrie Centre Mid Career Bursary (2019) and a Support for the Individual Artist award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (2017). Other awards include a Fellowship for the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers (2010), and joint first in Cúirt New Irish Writing (2008). In keeping with the focus of her work on the natural world, Mary Montague contributes to The Guardian’s Country Diary. See also marymontaguewritersite.wordpress.com.  

PAT BORAN is an Irish poet, editor and film maker. He was born in 1963 in Portlaoise, in the Irish midlands, and has long since lived in Dublin. One of the best known Irish poets of his generation, he was Writer-in-Residence with Dublin City Libraries, Dublin City University and the Western Education and Library Board in Fermanagh. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, most recently Then Again (Dedalus Press, 2019) and Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku (Orange Crate Books, 2016) with photographs by the author. The Statues of Emo Court (2021), Building the Ark (2022) and On a wave of Light (2022) are single-poem volumes, with photographs by the author. A Man Is Only As Good: A Pocket Selected Poems was published in 2017 by Orange Crate Books. Editions of his poetry have been published in Italian, Hungarian, Macedonian and Portuguese, with further works in progress. Pat Boran's non-fiction includes the popular writers' handbook The Portable Creative Writing Workshop (various editions) and A Short History of Dublin (Mercier Press). His humorous memoir The Invisible Prison: Scenes from an Irish Childhood, was published by Dedalus Press in 2009 and published in Italian as Un'Infanzia Irlandese in 2019 by Edizioni Kolibris. A former editor of Poetry Ireland Review and a former presenter of The Poetry Programme and The Enchanted Way on RTÉ Radio 1, Pat Boran has edited numerous anthologies of Irish poetry, among them Wingspan: A Dedalus Sampler (2006), Flowing, Still: Irish Poets on Irish Poetry (2009), The Bee-Loud Glade (2009), Shine On: Irish writers supporting those affected by mental ill health (2011), the 2014 Dublin One City, One Book choice If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song (with co-editor Gerard Smyth) and, with co-editor Eugene O'Connell, The Deep Heart's Core: Irish Poets Revisit a Touchstone Poem (2017). During lockdown in Spring 2020 he edited the popular anthology, The Word Ark: A Pocket Book of Animal Poems, illustrated by Sicilian artist Gaetano Tranchino. Since 2020 he has made more than a dozen short poetry films which have shown at film and literary festivals all over the world. Pat Boran’s distinctions include The Patrick Kavanagh Award and the US-based Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish affiliation of creative artists. (See also www.patboran.com)