Loose Leaves

Anne Carson in keynote address for Poetry Now

Canadian poet and critic Anne Carson will speak on the challenges of translation when she gives the keynote address at the Poetry Now international festival in Dún Laoghaire, which runs from March 24th to 27th.

Carson's most recent book Nox, an epitaph written about the death of her brother, describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101by Catullus, an elegy for his brother who also died in far-off parts . As well as being a resonating piece of writing, Noxis also a beautiful artefact into which Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches as she went along.

"She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote," is how Carson was rated by the late Susan Sontag while festival curator Belinda McKeon says there is no-one like Anne Carson writing today. "Her rich body of work defies classification; her poems, essays and prose work match formal inventiveness with fierce discursive depth, stretching boundaries, meshing traditions and morphing genres. From her first book, Eros the Bittersweet(1986), Carson has demonstrated her marvellous intellect and her capacity for invention; works like Plainwater(1995) and Decreation(2005) made very clear that a powerful force was at work. As for her most recent book, the beautiful narrative object Nox(2010), nobody who has read it can think about the art or language of lament in the same way again."

Another festival highlight is an Irish Literature Exchange seminar marking the centenary of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz who survived the German occupation of Warsaw and went on to win the Nobel prize. He died aged 93 in 2004.

Poets from various countries including Poland, Spain, Estonia and the US will be at the festival. There'll be a reading by last year's Irish TimesPoetry Now Award winner Sinéad Morrissey, while Senator David Norris , broadcaster Miriam O'Callaghan and a number of poets, will outline poems which say something about Ireland – and where it is today – at an event called For This.

And will this be the final Poetry Now festival as has been suggested in literary circles in recent months? Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown arts officer Kenneth Redmond’s answer to this question this week was that the council “remains committed to supporting poetry and the ongoing delivery of Poetry Now. However, we find ourselves in challenging times that may impact on the way this highly regarded festival is delivered beyond 2011.” All who have been thrilled by international and Irish poets in Dún Laoghaire over the past 15 years will be fervently hoping that Dublin does not lose a poetry festival of such high calibre at a time when, on all fronts, we are losing so much else .

See poetrynow.ie or poetrynow@artscope.ie

Making connections with Cities of Literature

Links with our sister Unesco Cities of Literature – Edinburgh, Iowa City and Melbourne – is a new feature of the annual Dublin Writers’ Festival, which moves back a week this year from its usual slot at the beginning of June to the last week of May. Since there are only four Cities of Literatures worldwide, a programme of events highlights the connection. The festival runs from May 23rd-29th and includes an appearance by writer and comedian, actor and television presenter, Michael Palin, at the National Concert Hall on May 25th. Palin will be looking back from the earliest days of Python-mania to travels that have taken him from the Sahara to the Himalayas.

See dublinwritersfestival.com