Anne Stevenson, Homero Aridjis and Paul Muldoon
Saturday 27th March at 8.30pm €20/15/12
Anne Stevenson
Anne Stevenson was born in 1933 in Cambridge, England, and grew up in New England and Michigan, settling in Britain in 1964. She is the author of 17 volumes of poetry, most recently Stone Milk (Bloodaxe, 2007), which she described, upon its publication, as her “final book”. She is also the author of several highly acclaimed works of literary criticism and biography; in 1966, she published the first critical study of Elizabeth Bishop, about whom she wrote a second book, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Bloodaxe) in 2007. Bitter Fame (Viking, 1989), her biography of her contemporary, Sylvia Plath, was described by Janet Malcolm as “by far the most intelligent, and the only authentically satisfying” biography of that poet. She has held many literary fellowships, and in 2007 was awarded the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry, a Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation of Chicago and the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. Anne Stevenson: Selected Poems, edited by Andrew Motion, was published by the Library of America in 2008.
“...a contemporary Emily Dickinson,
a poet who works on a small canvas,
quietly, with big themes”.
Jay Parini
Homero Aridjis
One of the leading figures in Latin American literature, Homero Aridjis was born in 1940 in the village of Contepec, Michoacán, Mexico. He has published over 40 books. His selected poems were published in English translation in 2001 in Eyes to See Otherwise (Carcanet), and a new collection, Solar Poems, translated by the Northern Irish poet George McWhirter, appeared this year from City Lights. In the 1970s, he was appointed ambassador to the Netherlands and Switzerland, but - in the tradition of Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes - soon resigned to become an enrivonmental activist, an area in which he is recognised as a true pioneer; he has been called “the conscience of Mexico”. In 1985, he founded the legendary Group of 100, an environmentalist association of writers, artists and scientists. From 1997 - 2003, Aridjis served two terms as president of International PEN, and is now President Emeritus. Since 2007, he has been Mexico’s ambassador to UNESCO. He has received many awards for his poetry and fiction, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Smederevo Golden Key Prize, the John Hay Award and the Prix Roger Caillois. He resides in Paris and Mexico City.
“Homero Aridjis’s poems open a door
into the light.”
Seamus Heaney
Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, educated in Armagh and at Queen’s University, Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. In 2007 he was appointed poetry editor of The New Yorker. He is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Quoof (Faber, 1983), Hay (Faber, 1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (Faber, 2002), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Horse Latitudes (Faber, 2006). His new collection, Maggot, will appear later this year.
“the most significant Englishlanguage
poet born since the second
World War.”
The Times Literary Supplement