Poetry

This is not comprehensive: the page just collects some links and resources from this site and elsewhere, many of which are relevant to the Irish Leaving Certificate course.

General

• I made these 5-minute ‘Patterns of Poetry’ podcasts in 2010 covering things like alliteration, metaphor and hyperbole.

Elizabeth Bishop

• Comments on Jonathan F.S. Post’s excellent Elizabeth Bishop: a very short introduction.

Eavan Boland

• A talk on the occasion of her death, incorporating a podcast episode on her poem ‘This Moment’.

• My comments on her posthumously-published collection, The Historians.

Geoffrey Chaucer

• I talked to the late Professor Terry Dolan about Chaucer, particularly The Canterbury Tales.

• Patience Agbabi’s modern rendering, Telling Tales, is well-worth your attention.

• My comments on Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath: a biography.

John Donne

• Katherine Rundell’s book Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne is truly thrilling: my comments. Pair this with John Carey’s also-brilliant 1983 analysis, John Donne: life, mind and art.

Seamus Heaney

• My comments on Roy Foster’s skilful overview of Heaney’s career, On Seamus Heaney (I recommend the book to all).

• My comments on Adam Low’s documentary Seamus Heaney and the Music of What Happens.

• My podcast on Heaney’s lovely poem ‘Sunlight’, from the collection North.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

• My piece on reading Hopkins as a teenager, and on teaching his poems for many years.

John Keats

• My comments on Jonathan Bate’s excellent double-biography Bright Star, Green Light: the beautiful and damned lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

William Wordsworth

• A set of 27 Quizlet flashcards based on Leaving Certificate poems, including ‘Tintern Abbey’: work out the missing words, and then think about the importance of the complete statement.

W.B. Yeats

• A podcast I made on the poem ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, putting it in its literary and historical context.