Loose Leaves/Sadbh: There is a strong Irish element on the shortlists for this year's 13th annual Forward Prizes for Poetry, the results of which will be announced next Wednesday at London's Groucho Club.
Michael Longley, nominated for his collection Snow Water (Cape), is among the five poets up for the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection, which is worth £10,000. The rest of the field comprises Kate Clanchy, Kathleen Jamie, August Kleinzahler and Michael Symmons.
Belfast poet Leontia Flynn is on the shortlist for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection for her book, These Days (Cape).This prize is worth £5,000. Flynn, who is still in her 20s, was named on the 20-strong Next Generation Poets list announced last June in Britain.
Vona Groarke, meanwhile, features on the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem shortlist for 'The Local Accent', which appeared in the literary periodical Metre. The prize is worth £1,000.
Sereni reflections
Italian writing features strongly in the latest issue of Poetry Ireland Review, edited by Peter Sirr. A large section of the periodical is devoted to the work of Vittorio Sereni (1913- 1983), widely regarded as the finest Italian poet of the generation after Montale. His story is told in an essay by Peter Robinson, whose own Selected Poems was published last year by Carcanet. Taken prisoner with Italian forces at the end of the second World War it seemed at one point as if Sereni and other POWs would be sent to camps in the US; instead he spent a year and a half in various American-run camps near Oran, in Algeria.
"If it was Sereni's human fate to find himself on the wrong side during his first 30 years, it was his destiny as a writer to witness and then explore that fate," writes Robinson. Arguing for the overwhelming cultural importance of Sereni's work, Robinson explains that it shows how, with sustained effort, goodness can be born from error and self-betrayal.
The magazine also contains a selection of Sereni's work, while Marco Sonzogni reviews The Faber Book of 20th Century Italian Poems. Fittingly, this issue will be launched at the Italian Cultural Institute in Dublin next week by poet and diplomat Philip McDonagh, Irish Ambassador to the Holy See.
The issue also contains reviews, essays, and poetry by Eamon Grennan, Peter Fallon, Fergus Allen and others.
Poetry Ireland Review, issue 80, September 2004, €7.99
Lives in words
In what ways do we as readers derive an understanding of how writers create lives in their work, be it in biography, autobiography, memoir, poetry or novel? This is the theme to be explored in Reading Lives/Writing Lives, an event organised by the Reading Centre at the Church of Ireland College of Education on Rathmines Road in Dublin. There is a €60 fee for the event, which takes place on November 5th and 6th, and speakers include Polly Devlin, Aubrey Flegg, Dennis O'Driscoll and Morgan Llywelyn.
For more details, tel: 01-4970033 or e-mail readingcentre@cice.ie
Prize for Swift wit
The Kilkenny International Swift Society's Swiftian satire competition, worth €1,000, has been won by Brian Lalor, artist, writer and, most recently, general editor of The Encyclopaedia of Ireland.
The competition was for a poem of some length on a contemporary topic in the manner of Swift. Lalor won with a 250-line poem, 'On Publishing, A Rhapsody', described by judge and Swiftian scholar Prof Joe McMinn of Queen's University as a virtuoso imitation of Swift's poem, 'On Poetry, A Rhapsody'. Lalor's work showed, said McMinn, that he had a detailed and imaginative appreciation of what Swift was up to in his poem.
" Swift's original is a satire on Grub Street," McMinn said. "This version is a comic variation upon that theme, now set in the brutal and demeaning world of Irish commercial publishing."
McMinn said that, above all, he liked the persona in the poem, the character of an author struggling to be published, "desperate and deluded in equal measure".
For further details and the text of the winning poem, see www.swiftsociety.com