The Book Bar
12-13 Shaftesbury Square
Belfast
Ireland
Free and open to the public.
The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry is very pleased to host this event, and to welcome back to Belfast two former Fullbright Distinguished Scholars, Erika Meitner and Wayne Miller. They will be joined by current PhD student Dane Holt for this afternoon reading.
ERIKA MEITNER is the author of five books of poems, most recently Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA, 2018) and Copia (2014). She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the University of Wisconsin; in 2015 she was the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. She teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Virginia Tech.
WAYNE MILLER is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Post- (Milkweed, 2016), which won the UNT Rilke Prize (for the best US poetry book of the year by a “mid-career poet”) and the Colorado Book Award. He has co-translated two books by the Albanian poet Moikom Zeqo, and he has co-edited three books, including Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed, 2016) and New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). In 2013 he was the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and edits the literary magazine Copper Nickel.
DANE HOLT is currently completing a PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast. His poems have appeared in Open Ear and The Tangerine. In 2018 he was selected as part of the Poetry Ireland Introduction Series.
Wayne Miller
Wayne Miller’s books of poetry include Only the Senses Sleep, The Book of Props, The City, Our City, Post-, and We the Jury.
Bringing together a wide range of perspectives—industry veterans and provocateurs, writers, editors, and digital mavericks—this collection reflects on the current situation of literary publishing, and provides a road map for the shifting geography of its future.
These poems exist in the wake of catastrophe: rogue gunmen, debt, hoax bombs, riots, and consumerism all haunt its pages. And yet this collection cuts through pain to open up a way forward, thrumming with pathos and humor, pain and the beauty of living.
A breakout collection that showcases the voice of a young poet striking out, dramatically, emphatically, to stake his claim on “the City”—an unnamed, crowded place. These poems—in turn elegiac, celebratory, haunting, grave, and joyful—give hum to our modern experience, to all those caught up in the City’s immensity.
A tightrope walker who travels on telephone wires; angels, scarecrows, friends, and lovers—the speakers in these poems often desire to hold time still, even as they acknowledge that to do so would actually mean the death of love, of experience. This collection is an imaginative yet authentic inquiry into the varied constructs in which we define love.