In this lecture Paula Meehan delivers the Ireland Chair of Poetry Lecture, 2014. The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust was set up in 1998 and is jointly held between Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

This talk explores the challenges involved in writing the city of Dublin into poetry. It considers the insights and emotions that emerge from reading the work of these poets as they write to remember, to celebrate and to interrogate Dublin as a place of personal and national significance.

This talk explores some poems by women published in the last one hundred years, from lesser-known figures such as Winifred Letts to contemporaries Eavan Boland and Paula Meehan.

This short talk will consider some of the ways in which poems in the If Ever You Go anthology visualise and present people in the city environment of Dublin. The poems included cover a broad historical range, from Samuel Ferguson to Paula Meehan, revealing the important representation of Dublin people in these texts...

The poems that appear in this anthology reflect the broad spectrum of relationships that exist between the city and those that inhabit, however briefly, its public and private spaces. From speakers who trace their Dublin roots through generations, to those who visit the city for a short time, perhaps to visit a hospital there, these poems express the varying emotions generated by the experience. Featuring reflections on poems by Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Kennelly and John Montague, among others, this talk considers the poetry of the Dublin streets and what it tells us about the relationship between the city and its people.

Irish literature has often been shaped by its relation to the national through land and the consciousness of land.  New perspectives provided by Atlantic studies, however, now allow for new narratives unrelated to land to be put into conversation with older narratives. This lecture examines work by two twentieth-century poets, one early and one late, that offer insight on this.

This lecture takes Thomas Carnduff's shipyard poetry, written in the 1920s and 1930s, as a way in which to understand the complexities of labour which underpinned the products of the shipyards and to reconsider the meaning of the shipyards for Belfast today.

This lecture is concerned with the mid-twentieth-century Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson. Far from being a late Lake District poet', Nicholson is chiefly a poet of northern England's Atlantic edge, the Cumbrian coastal strip.

In 1722 an anonymous author styling himself with the degree 'A. M. in Hydrostat' published a proposal in Dublin with the title, Thoughts of a Project for Draining the Irish Channel, a satire on both the South-Sea Bubble and Anglo-Irish politics...

This lecture discusses the ways in which culture plays a much-needed role in the commemoration of abuse trauma. Yet culture cannot stand alone and the lecture subsequently calls for a state-led official history of Ireland's institutional past which addresses the class and gender-based operation of these institutions in a holistic system of incarceration.