To mark his 80th birthday Maurice Harmon has brought together poems written in the last two years together with selections from his three collections published by Salmon: The Last Regatta, The Doll with Two Backs, and The Mischievous Boy.
In When Love Is Not Enough, the range and variety of Harmon’s work is made instantly apparent. His distinctive voice, both serious and playful, combines love poems with political satire, elegies with family portraits; he also writes poems of surprising eroticism, centred around his questioning of clerical oppression. This selection includes translation from Acallam na Senórach, the medieval anthology of Irish stories and poems, including the haunting ‘Créde’s Lament’, and from work by the contemporary Galician poet, Ana Romani, including the compelling ‘Would that the sperm whales’.
"Harmon displays an ability to combine tenderness and pathos with a fiercely unsentimental honesty... his distinctive talent is for the sustained narrative of memory."
Paul Perry, Irish Times (on The Mischievous Boy)
Maurice Harmon, Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin, is a distinguished critic, biographer, editor, literary historian, and poet. He has edited No Author Better Served: The Correspondence between Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Harvard University Press, 2000) and has translated the medieval Irish compendium of stories and poems The Colloquy of the Old Men (Academica, 2001). He has written studies of several Irish writers, including Seán O’Faoláin, Austin Clarke and Thomas Kinsella, and edited the ground-breaking anthology Irish Poetry After Yeats (Little, Brown, 1988).
In When Love Is Not Enough, the range and variety of Harmon’s work is made instantly apparent. His distinctive voice, both serious and playful, combines love poems with political satire, elegies with family portraits; he also writes poems of surprising eroticism, centred around his questioning of clerical oppression. This selection includes translation from Acallam na Senórach, the medieval anthology of Irish stories and poems, including the haunting ‘Créde’s Lament’, and from work by the contemporary Galician poet, Ana Romani, including the compelling ‘Would that the sperm whales’.
"Harmon displays an ability to combine tenderness and pathos with a fiercely unsentimental honesty... his distinctive talent is for the sustained narrative of memory."
Paul Perry, Irish Times (on The Mischievous Boy)
Maurice Harmon, Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin, is a distinguished critic, biographer, editor, literary historian, and poet. He has edited No Author Better Served: The Correspondence between Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Harvard University Press, 2000) and has translated the medieval Irish compendium of stories and poems The Colloquy of the Old Men (Academica, 2001). He has written studies of several Irish writers, including Seán O’Faoláin, Austin Clarke and Thomas Kinsella, and edited the ground-breaking anthology Irish Poetry After Yeats (Little, Brown, 1988).