Trevor Joyce

Ivor Griffiths, Poet, Novelist & Short Story Writer

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Trevor Joyce (born October 26, 1947) is an Irish poet, born in Dublin.

He co-founded New Writers' Press in Dublin in 1967 and was a founding editor of NWP's The Lace Curtain; A Magazine of Poetry and Criticism in 1968.

Early books include Sole Glum Trek (1967), Watches (1968), Pentahedron (1972) and The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976). The last of these is a version of the Middle-Irish Buile Suibhne, well known from Seamus Heaney's later translation in Sweeney Astray (1983).

After a near-total silence for twenty years, he resumed publishing in 1995 with stone floods, followed by Syzygy and Without Asylum (1998).

Joyce's poetry employs a wide range of forms and techniques, ranging from traditional to modern experimentalism. He has published notable versions from Chinese and from the middle-Irish, which he refers to as "workings" rather than "translations" to emphasize that they are poetic reimaginings in the tradition of Ezra Pound rather than "straight" translations.

A collected poems up to 2000, including his "workings" from the Irish and Chinese, was published as with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold (2001). More recent work appeared in a pair of chapbooks, Take Over and Undone, Say (2003). He has also experimented with web-based poetry projects such as the collaborative project OffSets. A collection of his post-with the first dream work, What's in Store, is planned for 2007, as is a separate collection of new and old translations from the Irish entitled Courts of Air and Earth.

He is a Fulbright Scholar and a member of Aosdána.

  • Video of reading at 2005 SoundEye Festival
  • MP3 of radio interview for Cross-Cultural Poetics at PennSound
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