We hope you will join us to celebrate the Cork launch of Long Distance by John FitzGerald.
The event will take place at 8.30pm, Friday 10 May 2024 in the Castle Hotel, Macroom, County Cork. Guest speaker Dr Heather Laird, Head of the School of English, UCC will say a few words on the night and John FitzGerald will read some of his poems. They will be joined by special guest Iarla Ó Lionáird.
All are welcome, no booking is required.
Long Distance reveals the deepening impression of a poet who is both chronicler of all that fades and passes and observer of ‘our giant reapers’ that harvest wind for ‘our new elixir’.
In forms that range from sequences of sonnets to haiku he acknowledges and brings to life vividly worlds familiar and strange — what he calls ‘the remote and the ordinary’ — as he hovers somewhere between them. A schoolboy absorbs the effects of Seán Ó Riada’s cortège. There’s a translation of an early photograph and the ‘surround sound’ of a corncrake while settings reach from his home place in West Cork to Queensland, Australia, and a mountain in China’s Hunan province.
‘I have work to do / to keep it all as it is,’ he writes in resonant and remarkable poems cognizant that ‘a long note / from an angel’s throat once sung / can never be silenced’.
John FitzGerald was born in Cork in 1962. He won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2014 and was shortlisted for a Hennessy Award in 2015. A chapbook, First Cut, appeared in 2017, followed by Darklight, a limited edition, in 2019.
A recipient of a Key West Literary Bursary, John FitzGerald has lived in Dublin, London and Florence, and since 1995 has worked as University Librarian at University College Cork. He lives with his family on their farm in Carrigdarrery, County Cork. The Time Being was published by The Gallery Press in 2021 and was shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize.
The Gallery Press published, in 2023, his translation of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire by Eileen O’Connell /The Lament for Art O’Leary which includes the Irish and, for the first time, Jack B Yeats’s monochrome drawings.
