LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: Irish poetry

  • Peering across the Atlantic

    When, back in the primordial mists of the 90s, I was hired to teach 20th century poetry in English, I well-prepared to construct U.S.-based syllabi. British and Irish poetries, however, were visible to me only as hills and treetops peeking above a general fog. I knew the international modernists and a few later border-crossers, especially…

  • Women on the radio

    Broadcast, by Zayneb Allak It’s about loneliness. A woman from Birmingham tells us about the time she was lonely. When I left Birmingham the Bull Ring was still ashen. I remember it in the slush: a lady in a pink and gold sari with a grey anorak over the top dragged blue and white plastic…

  • Poetic navigation

    The kids, you’ll be shocked to hear, haven’t been especially receptive to the Yeats I’ve been reading aloud over dinner. Madeleine thinks the Maud Gonne poems consign Yeats to creepy stalker territory and isn’t nearly as impressed as I am by the beauty of it all—and I was moving chronologically, so I didn’t even get…