Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey

Description

This new volume of essays provides a critical re-evaluation of Brian Coffey (1905-1995), a leading figure in Ireland’s post-Independence poetic avant garde. With contributions from younger scholars as well as veteran Coffey commentators, the book casts new light on one of the most fascinating yet least understood figures in twentieth-century Irish letters. Philosopher, scientist, friend of Samuel Beckett, Denis Devlin and Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey’s writing career spanned six decades, two continents, and a vast range of interests and influences. Offering a comprehensive re-assessment of his poetic achievement, the collection seeks to situate Coffey as a distinctive and original voice in Irish poetry whose influence and importance have been overlooked. It also reveals the poet’s complex negotiations with Irish identity, Catholicism, and his own condition of unwilling exile. The contributors consider Coffey within broader cultural contexts, examining his collaborations with S.W. Hayter, his activities as a small press publisher, and his position as exemplar for a later generation of Irish and British poets impatient with mainstream poetics. These critical essays are interspersed with a number of personal reflections by friends and family of the poet, providing an intimate portrait of this enigmatic writer. Throughout, the collection displays Brian Coffey as a powerful poet, a profound thinker, and a tireless advocate of the work of others, one with a clear vision of what poetry is and what it can be.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ~ Benjamin Keatinge and Aengus Woods
2. Seeing Brian Coffey: ‘word hidden for all’ ~ Augustus Young
3. Brian Coffey: Opposing the Inevitable ~ Gerald Dawe
4. ‘Well-made things are worth songs’: The Music of Third Person ~ Maria Johnston
5. Eight Lines of Coffey: A Note on Prosody ~ Geoffrey Squires
6. Brian Coffey and George Reavey: A Friendship of Lasting Importance ~ Sandra O’Connell
7. Le Livre d’artiste: Mallarmé, Reavey, Coffey ~ Thomas Dillon Redshaw
8. Brian Coffey’s Review of Beckett’s Murphy: Take warnings while you praise’ ~ J.C.C. Mays
9. More and/or Less than Fifty Years Ago ~ Brian Coffey, with Editors’ Note
10. ‘Missouri Sequence’ and the Search for a Habitat ~ Benjamin Keatinge
11. Brian Coffey, Jacques Maritain and ‘Missouri Sequence’ ~ James Matthew Wilson
12. Brian Coffey’s Metaphysics of Love ~ Aengus Woods
13. Coffey/Dante/Pound: A Personal Encounter ~ Billy Mills
14. Mapping half of Advent ~ Harry Gilonis
15. Brian Coffey and the Two Fat Ladies ~ John Parsons
16. Homeric Spirituality: The Metaphor of the Heroic in Death of Hektor ~ Waclaw Grzybowski
17. ‘Hektor across three thousand years’: Antiquity and the Modern Moment ~ Andrew Goodspeed
18. Coffey with TV: A Personal Memoir ~ Michael Smith
19. ‘Must not attempt escape/from here now’: Maurice Scully Reading Brian Coffey ~ Kit Fryatt
20. Brian Coffey: A Child’s Memories ~ John Coffey
21. Descriptive Checklist of Books and Pamphlets by Brian Coffey ~ Thomas Dillon Redshaw

Brian Coffey: A Bibliography ~ Aengus Woods