Publisher's Synopsis
This special tribute book celebrates Maurice Harmon on his 80th birthday and features poems from some of Ireland's most famous modern poets.
With a Foreword by Christopher Murray, Emeritus Professor, University College Dublin and Joseph Woods, director of Poetry Ireland.
"The critic and poet Maurice Harmon is one of the most gracious figures on the scene, so it wasn't surprising to see the literati turn out in force for his 80th-birthday celebration in Dublin... What was surprising was that he now has eight decades behind him, because Harmon has the appearance of perennial youth. Fittingly, Christopher Murray, a colleague from UCD, where Harmon taught poetry for decades, reminded the throng that we were also celebrating the talents of a man still very much in harness. 'Maurice's own work as a poet is an extension of his work as a life-long lover of and commentator on poetry, especially Irish poetry from earliest times to the present.'..."
The Irish Times, June 2010
In addition to being a poet, Maurice Harmon is the leading scholar-critic of his generation in the field of Anglo-Irish Literature. He pioneered its development as an academic discipline and is the author of a number of significant works, from a basic bibliographical guide to headline studies of Seán O'Faoláin, Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella, and others. He edited the definitive anthology Irish Poetry after Yeats (1978, 1998) and published The Dialogue of the Ancients of Ireland (2009), a new translation of Acallam na Senórach. His poetry collections are: The Last Regatta (Salmon, 2001), The Doll with Two Backs (Salmon, 2004), The Mischievous Boy and other poems (Salmon, 2008), and When Love Is Not Enough: New & Selected Poems (Salmon, 2010).
