Laois poet to feature at Monasterevin Manley Hopkins festival

Portlaoise poet Pat Boran is among those to feature at the Monasterevin Hopkins 2023 Festival which returns after a pandemic enforced absence.

The organisers have put together a line up of top flight Hopkins contributors retained for this year’s festival which commences on Friday, July 28 and runs throughout that weekend.

The event which is the brainchild of Sr. Ann Scully, Monasterevan Convent of Mercy, and curated by her, will be opened on Friday afternoon , July 28 at 4 pm in the local Monasterevin Community Centre.

Following the Opening Ceremony the first of the lectures of the weekend will be delivered by Irene Kyffin, vice-chairperson of the Monasterevin Hopkins Society. Irene is a distinguished Hopkins Scholar and has lectured on the subject for many years at many venues.

However on this occasion she will be delivering a lecture entitled “Geometric Abstraction”. This talk explores the birth of the art form, Geometric Abstraction from its roots in Constructivism-from which it takes an alternative name: Systematic

Constructivism.

Irene came to the UK from Ireland in her late teens. She began her studies in her late 30s, took a degree in teaching Speech and Drama and went on to do a Masters in Social Anthropology. Irene has taught in Prmary, Secondary and Further Education sectors and lectured at University.

She devised a programme, The Nature of Hopkins with the famous jazz pianist Stan Tracey. Hopkins poems were read as jazz/poetry fusion and this programme was presented at Literature Festivals in the UK. She has written and presented many papers on Hopkins at conferences in the USA, UK, Ireland and Nepal.

Over the past number of years one of the features of the festival has been the annual concert which has featured many well known singers. And this high standard will be maintained when tenor Dominic McGorian will be the star attraction. The venue for this year’s concert St. John’s Church, Main Street, which has been made available through the good offices of the Church of Ireland community.

This will be the second occasion for Dominic to feature at a Hopkins Festival and judging by his first performance he should attract a full house.

Then on Saturday morning the first lecture “Hopkins and Himself” In Monasterevan Community Centre commencing at 10 am will be delivered by Anna J. Nickerson. She is the Katherine Jex-Blake, Research Fellow and College Lecturer in English at Girton College, University of Cambridge.

Her first monograph, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Intellectual Life, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury for their new series Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. She is co-editor of Walter de la Mare: critical appraisals (2022) and she has written on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature for Essays in Criticism, Victorian Poetry, the Cambridge Quarterly,Philosophy and

Literature, and Religion and Literature.

The second lecture which is entitled “Fosterer: the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins on the poetry of Seamus Heaney”, will be delivered by Gary Wade. He graduated from Durham University with a PhD in English Literature in 2021, where he worked on a Catholic sensibility in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. He was Warden of Trinity Hall (St. Chad’s College) between 2018 and 2021.

He also holds a Master’s degree in Classical Reception from University College London , and in Theology from the University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Seamus Heaney and Catholicism and on an essay “Moving in Step: Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh” to be included in the forthcoming “The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney’s Prose”, to be published by Routledge in 2024.

Gary is Assistant Chaplain at Haileybury College in Hertfordshire. At 2.30 in the afternoon the venue will be Monasterevin House which is the Head House of the Presentation Order of Nuns and where Hopkins spent his vacations as a guest of the Miss Cassidys.

In charge of the proceedings here will be the Laois poet, Pat Boran, winner of the Patrick Kavanagh award for Poetry in 1989 and the US based Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award.

The Portlaoise man has also published more than a dozen books on poetry and prose. Pat, a native of Portlaoise, is a former editor of Poetry Ireland Review and over the years he has received a number of Arts Council Bursaries and travel awards and has represented Ireland at poetry and literary festivals across Europe. His books have been translated into many languages including Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, French, Greek and Georgian.

The day will conclude with the popular “My Favourite Hopkins Poem” when the audience will have the opportunity to recite their favourite from Hopkins repertoire.

For lots more on the festival events see HERE.