LooseLeaves Caroline WalshThe poetry world is limbering up this month for the centenary celebrations of WH Auden's birth in York.
And on this side of the water there is another major literary centenary, that of Auden's contemporary at Oxford, Louis MacNeice, born in Belfast on September 12th, 1907. Auden, who was his companion on the trip to Iceland in 1936 that led to their collection of essays, letters and poems Letters from Iceland, spoke at MacNeice's memorial service following his untimely death in England in 1963 from viral pneumonia, contracted after he got caught in a storm while out on the Yorkshire moors.
"I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries/ To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:/ Thence to smoky Carrick in County Antrim . . . " is how MacNeice remembered his birthplace in Carrickfergus. Now his native Northern Ireland is doing him proud with a centenary conference and celebration at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University Belfast, from September 12th to 15th. Simon Armitage, Terence Brown, Paul Farley, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, Derek Mahon, Sinéad Morrissey, Paul Muldoon and Don Paterson are among the impressive line-up of speakers and poets participating. Topics to be discussed include MacNeice's poetry, prose and plays; his place in modern poetry and relation to literary modernism; and his literary, cultural and political contexts in Britain and Ireland. But there's an outing too - a tour from Belfast taking in a MacNeice exhibition in Carrickfergus Museum and Christ Church in Carrowdore where the writer is buried (right), a place indelibly invoked in Mahon's poem In Carrowdore Churchyard (at the grave of Louis MacNeice):
Your ashes will not fly, however
the rough winds burst
Through the wild brambles and the
reticent trees.
All we may ask of you we have; the
rest
Is not for publication,will not be
heard.
Written by Mahon after a pilgrimage to the poet's grave not long after his death, in the company of Longley and Seamus Heaney when all were young poets, it has to be one of the loveliest elegies of all time. More details of the centenary conference at www.qub.ac.uk/heaneycentre.
The new academy awards
It's not everyday a journalist sits down at her desk, logs on and discovers she's been asked to become a member of a newly established body with the august title of the Irish Literary Academy. When the invitation arrived the other day, thoughts of the Académie Française - whose 40 members are known as immortels and who hold office for life - came straight to mind. Delusions of grandeur, it seems, are never far away. The invitation came from the expanded Irish Book Awards, the shortlists for which were announced on Wednesday and reported in Thursday's paper and which include, across nine categories, Patrick McCabe, Cecelia Ahern, John Boyne, Maeve Binchy, Paul McGrath, co-authors Shane Hegarty and Fintan O'Toole - and John Banville in his crime writer's guise of Benjamin Black. The shortlists emerged from a ballot of more than 200 Irish book sellers, but the winners, in seven of the categories, will be chosen by members of the new academy, made up of a panel of about 60 people, including literary enthusiasts, publishing executives, retailers, literary journalists and previously shortlisted authors. Two categories will be decided by a public vote. These are RTÉ Radio 1's The Tubridy Show Listeners' Choice award and the Galaxy Irish Popular Fiction Book of the Year award. To take part in this voting process, readers can pick up a ballot card in their local bookshop. All winners will be announced on March 15th.
Durcan on the Clifton trail
The title of a public lecture to be given by poet Paul Durcan in this, his third and final year as Ireland Professor of Poetry, has an intriguing ring to it: The Mystery of Harry Clifton. To find out just what the mystery of poet and short story writer Clifton is, the public is invited to attend the lecture at Q015 in the Quinn School of Business, University College Dublin at 7.45pm on Thursday. Incidentally, a call for nominations for the next professor of poetry, a cross-Border chair, will go out soon. Run under the auspices of the two arts councils, Trinity College Dublin, Queen's University Belfast, and University College Dublin, the holder is attached to each of the three universities for a year at a time.