JAMES LIDDY:James Liddy who has died aged 74, was one of Ireland's leading poets and the creator of a body of work unique in both contemporary Irish and American literature. A professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he had worked in the United States for more than 40 years.
Mary Cloake, director of the Arts Council, said: "James Liddy was one of the most independent, engaging and original poets of his time, [whose] poetry revealed a consistent intellectual and emotional curiosity."
The poet Gerard Dawe described him as a cosmopolitan man who provided a valuable link between the "Patrick Kavanagh generation" and a group of younger poets who came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. "Those who were close to him were extremely fond of him. There was an emotional engagement. People in his circle felt strongly about him. That's rare enough today," he said.
His publications include Esau, My Kingdom for a Drink(1962), In a Blue Smoke(1964), Blue Mountain(1968), A Life of Stephen Dedalus(1969), Baudelaire's Bar Room Flowers(1975), Corca Bascinn(1977), Comyn's Lay(1978), Chamber Pot Music(1982), At the Grave of Father Sweetman(1984), A White Thought in a White Shade/New Selected Poems(1987), Art is Not for Grown-Ups(1990), In the Slovak Bowling Alley(1990), Collected Poems(1994), Epitaphery(1998), Gold Set Dancing(2000) and I Only Know That I Love Strength in My Friends and Greatness(2003). The Doctor's House: An Autobiographywas published in 2005.
Interviewed for Studiesin 1996, he said: "I will have to say straight away that being queer, like being Irish and being Catholic, has charted my imagination."
His gay sensibility began to emerge in the poetry collection A Munster Song of Love and War(1971), while his novel Young Men Go Walking(1986) is notable for its open celebration of homosexuality.
Born in Dublin in 1934 to a New York-born mother and a father from Limerick, he grew up in Coolgreany, Co Wexford, where his father was the dispensary doctor. Educated at Glenstal Abbey, University College Dublin and King's Inns, he practised law until the early 1960s when he became a fulltime writer.
After a spell in Spain, in 1967 he went to lecture at San Francisco State College, living in the Haight-Ashbury area. He eventually made his home in Milwaukee.
Baudelaire, Whitman and Kerouac were influences, while the work of William Blake, particularly The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, appears to have had a great impact on his imagination.
With his friend and mentor Patrick Kavanagh, he shared an unwavering hostility to bourgeois values.
He described the world as a "prison/Run by elderly bores" and bureaucrats who stand in the way of "the revolution we imagine/in which each of us will love/the other . . . " He favoured poems of "emotional intelligence" in which the "language and imagery are clear and evocative yet mysterious".
He rejected the idea of "the poem waiting there to be put together by the Department of English grammatical kit" in favour of "responsibility to the poem" in which the poem is founded on its allegiance to the imagination.
With Michael Hartnett and Liam O'Connor he co-edited the journal Arena, which he also funded, and was a contributor to a number of literary magazines including Aquarius, The Dublinerand Kilkenny Magazine.A former chairman of the Gorey Arts Centre, he edited the Gorey Detail. More recently he was associated with a Milwaukee journal, the Blue Canary, and was an occasional reviewer for The Irish Times.
An authority on James Joyce, he proposed in 1982 that Beresford Place should be renamed Nora Barnacle Place, but the proposal was turned down by Dublin City Council.
A US citizen, he was a member of Aosdána. The second volume of his autobiography, The Full Shilling, is forthcoming. He is survived by his sister Nora and his partner, Jim Chapson.
• James Liddy: born July 1st, 1934; died November 4th, 2008