Poetry

Iggy McGovern is the author of two poetry collections from Dedalus Press

www.dedaluspress.com/poets/mcgovern.html

The King of Suburbia was published in 2005

this collection won the inaugural Glen Dimplex New Writers Award for Poetry

 

Safe House was published in 2010 and was reviewed in The Irish Times

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0108/1224287000768.htm

 

Iggy McGovern is available for readings et cetera

for audio samples see

www.dedaluspress.com/poets/mcgovern.html

http://digitalcollections.qub.ac.uk/poetry/recordings/results/play-file/store343/item106986/

email iggy.mcgovern@tcd.ie for full CV

 

Events in 2011

10.01.11 New York TCD Alumni Association, Ireland House, Manhattan

26.02.11 Kate O’Brien Weekend, Belltable Theatre, Limerick

05.03.11 Dublin Books Festival, Project Arts Theatre, Dublin

09.03.11 Dublin University Women’s Club, Provost’s House, Trinity College

15.03.11 Science & Literature, Long Room Hub, Trinity College

07.05.11 John Hewitt Spring Festival, Carnlough, County Antrim

Great Northern Novel Event: l-r Iggy McGovern, Kate Newman and Michael Foley

photograph by Paul Maddern

16.06.11 Irish Festival, Bloomsday, Oxford

03.07.11 Alchemy, Anglo-American University Library, Prague

23.07.11 Gerard Manley Hopkins Festival, Monasterevin, County Kildare

27.07.11 The National Gallery, Dublin

01.08.11 William Carleton Summer School, Clogher, County Tyrone

06.08.11 People’s Festival, Portadown

26.08.11 Tercentenary of The School of Medicine, TCD

03/04.09.11 Electric Picnic, Stradbally

Poetry at Electric Picnic (with Grace, Paul, David and Ayoma)

07.09.11 ESB 2011, Royal Hospital Kilmainham

08.09-06.10.11 Residency in Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris

20.10.11 Dublin Contemporary 2011

22.10.11 Magdalen College, Oxford

29.10.11 Kenny-Naughton Autumn School, Aghamore, Co Mayo

 

04.11.11 Alumni Awards, TCD

24.11.11 Friends of The Library, TCD

28.11.11 Simon Fundraiser, Bad Ass Cafe, Dublin

 

Events in 2012

 

05.02.12 Opening of Lithosphere, Visual Gallery, Carlow

20.02.12 Arts Tonight, RTE Radio 1

24.03.12 Intermediate School, Killorglin, Co Kerry

11-15.07.12 Euroscience Open Forum 2012

18.10.2012 Schroedinger in Dublin, Little Museum of Dublin

 

 

 

 

BIOGRAPHY

I was born in Coleraine and educated in Belfast. I hold degrees in physics from Queen’s University, Belfast. I am a Professor of Physics in Trinity College, Dublin.

I have published two collections of poetry, The King of Suburbia and Safe House, with Dedalus Press (www.dedaluspress.com); The King of Suburbia won the inaugural Glen Dimplex New Writers Award for Poetry. Other awards include the Hennessy Award for Poetry and The Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary. I have presented my poetry at writers’ festivals in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Europe, North America and Australasia.

My poetry is characterised by form & rhyme and humour; it also reflects my professional career as a physicist. I am interested in the common ground between Science and Literature. I was a founder member of SEED, a ginger-group for Arts-Science interaction, and I have interacted with Rough Magic and Barabbas theatre companies in this area.  I have given public presentations on this theme. See ‘Science and Poetry – not so different?’ in On Science & Literature (Four Courts Press) 2007

 

 

 

 

International Festival Readings

 

Melbourne Writers Festival (Aus), 2006

Christchurch Writers Festival (NZ), 2006

Tasmanian Poetry Festival (Aus), 2006

Yeats Festival (Irl), 2007, 2010

Ledbury Poetry Festival (UK), June 2007

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival (NZ), 2009

Australian Poetry Festival, Sydney 2010

Poetry Hearings, Berlin 2010

 

 

Other International Readings

 

The Art Bar, Toronto,2008

Ireland House, New York, 2008

Villanova University, Philadelphia, 2008

Irish Studies, Otago University, Dunedin 2009

Christchurch Arts (with Michael Harlow), 2009

The Bookworm, Beijing 2010

NZ Poetry Society,Wellington 2010

Alchemy, Prague, 2011

 

 

General

 

‘Hammer & Spark, a memory of E T S Walton’, presented to President  Robinson, 1997

‘Magdalen Sonnets’. presented to The President of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1999

Physics Advisor to the Rough Magic production of ‘Copenhagen’, Project Arts  2002

Programme notes for the Rough Magic production of “Improbable Frequency” 2004

‘Poems of Science (and scientists)’, British Association Festival of Science, Dublin 2005

Visiting Poet, Camphill Greenacres Special Needs Community, Dublin 2007

‘Science and Poetry – polar opposites or not so different?’, Irish Literary & Historical Society of San Francisco, 2009

Seamus Heaney 70^th Birthday Celebration, RTE Radio 1, 2009

John Hewitt Birthday Celebrations ‘Festival Nights’ BBC 2 Television, 2010

Poetry Ireland at Electric Picnic 2011

 

Anthologies

 

Real cool – poems to grow up with (Martello 1994)

Poetry Now Anthology (1997)

Magdalen Poets (1999)

Unacknowledged Legislators: thirty years of Fortnight poetry (2001)

Off The Wall (Martello 2002)

P is for Poetry (O’Brien Press 2005 and 2008)

Wingspan (Dedalus 2006)

Ireland’s Other Poetry: From Anonymous to Zozimus (Lilliput Press 2007)

A Treasury of Sunday Miscellany (New Island Press 2009)

The Quiet Quarter: Ten Years of Great Irish Writing (New Island Press 2009)

Dogs Singing (Salmon) 2010

 

 

Citations & Reviews

 

The Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards

Awarding Iggy McGovern the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award for Poetry, Ciaran Carson began by invoking the spirit and achievement of Kavanagh. ‘“A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward / Of a chest hospital,” says Patrick Kavanagh in “The Hospital”, a poem which directs us towards “the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard”. Kavanagh suggests that poetry can be made from the most ordinary of circumstances, so long as they are focused on with love, honesty and humour. These are qualities which announce themselves in the title of the winning book of poems. The author’s realm includes the DIY store, ping-pong, bottle banks, dance halls, skips, the new Luas bridge in Dundrum. It was a pleasure to read this book. It is an adventure.’

 

Review of The King of Suburbia (by James J McAuley)

No doubt about it, the short lyric has come to be the predominant form of verse in this world of the sound-bite, the slogan, the e-mail and the text message; though it was long before the advent of high-speed communications that Richard Eberhart complained about “the tyranny of the one-page poem”.

All the same, so long as the poems are as snazzy, and sharply focused, and ingeniously rhymed as Iggy McGovern’s one-pagers in The King of Suburbia, we can’t complain. This first collection, from one whose reputation has preceded it, consists mainly of umpteen variations on the sonnet, one sestina at the end, and nonce-forms that read like resurrections of long-lost rhyme schemes. The Bony, for example, combines a spine of short-lined vertebraic stanzas cunningly connected by a spinal cord of rhyme.

These assured formal techniques serve Prof McGovern’s purpose very well, for he’s a master of the ironic, the pun, the innuendo, and such feats of word-play as will keep a smile on any visage but that of the incorrigible cynic. We could do with a whole lot more of this kind of well-turned verse and sharply-observed ironies:

Getting everything off our chests
A kitchen knife removed for tests

And neither of us ultra vires
Two people helping with enquiries

(from Breaking up with Inspector Morse)

(from The Irish Times 2006)

 

Launch of Safe House (by Gerry Dawe)

When critics talk breezily about the cultural differences between north and south of Ireland – to either discount such as being no longer relevant, or, to bang on about how fundamental they still are, like a lot of people I get a bit queasy. Because you know that behind the ex-cathedra worldview there is a little bit of politics working its way into the picture and generally not for the good of our health, but for the edification of the speaker or writer.

Well, I have something to say here about Iggy McGovern that I don’t want to be misunderstood in this way. For quite simply, Iggy is the first poet I know of who hails from Coleraine, Co.Derry: a much overlooked, much mistaken northern market town on the glorious river Bann, which links north-east Ulster with its westerly counties. The town and river hold a particular spot in the hearts and minds of many thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of ordinary folk, as part of what was called ‘The Triangle’ – Coleraine, Portstewart and Portrush.

I’m not sure if people still refer to ‘The Triangle’ anymore but if they do I’m glad because to my faltering memory The Triangle calls up very definite, if at times, elusive meanings. There is the speech of the Triangle; there is the complex geography of the Triangle, and there is the actual place of the Triangle, or places. Iggy McGovern’s poetry embodies all the sides of this spectrum, without exaggeration or knowing self-regard.

The sound of his voice in the poems collected in his first volume, The King of Suburbia, was clear and playful and poignant. ‘’The Bony’, a poem about his father and his father’s people, is magical:

I fear

He’s here

Now with the same bony crew,

Light as a feathery ton:

O they have a job to do.

But not a word to my son.

The King of Suburbia was an impressive debut. Now five years on Iggy has published his second collection, Safe House, a confirmation, if ever it was needed, of his distinctive voice and poetic intelligence.

In the new collection the poet’s order and construction in three accumulating sections, takes the reader from familial beginnings to the  internal sequences of ‘Sacraments’ and ‘The Five Day Break’, leading into the commanding middle section, ‘Letters from the Captain’, and the shift in gear of the spirited curiosity of the final section. Throughout there is a marked increase of ambition in retracing past lives while the ever-pressing present converges convincingly upon such crackers as ‘The Scientific Question’, ‘Proverbs for the Computer Age’ and ‘A Measured Response’.

Iggy Mc Govern’s poems marry the great Czech poet and scientist’s doubtful rationality, Miroslov Holub, with the remaining instincts of his [Iggy’s] own Catholicism; the cagey inflections of his northern home and upbringing with its joy in, and playfulness with, ordinary language; respect for the intellect (Iggy is, after all, a brainy boy) and eye for the absurd. All can be heard in the site-specific sound system of Safe House.

I love the things that Iggy’s poems remember and the non-indulgent way of his with saying things, for example, in ‘Amber’s Epiphany’, the first stanza of which reads:

Was it Christmas Eve you came,

“the worst time of the year”

and nobody speaking of snow?

We were all on our best behaviour,

trying to live up to your name,

Amber – between ‘stop’ and ‘go’.

Or in the witty inventory of what ‘The Irish Poem Is’, which sounds like a neat and fitting place to end in praise of Safe House, where it not for an image I can’t quite leave behind of (I imagine) John McKernan, in Iggy’s poem, ‘The Mower’:

My good uncle’s caustic

Countryman’s wit,

A poet-mechanic

Bent over the task

Of replacing a bolt

Newly-fashioned in brass.

Rushlight among rust,

A faith-keeping beacon

Resurrecting the Just.

Look, he’s back in the seat,

Trailing clouds of Sweet Afton;

For the second, sweet cut.

 

‘Poet-mechanic’ is what Iggy Mc Govern is; or, if you prefer, a poet-physicist; and one of the very best at the job too. His poems sit within the traditional workings of the land and the play of the intellect; a smart micro-economy of the word that has been part and parcel of this country for ages and is present in Safe House ; a special code for laughter and wit and mirth as well as for  ‘heart mysteries’.

You should buy Safe House and read it aloud to yourself. It’s a splendid book that will make you laugh, and make you think, but mostly, it will make you want to read it all over again because, quite simply, you’ve enjoyed it.

 

 

Review of Safe House (by Eamon Grennan)

WIDELY PRAISED for the witty, engaged, humorous qualities of his first book, Iggy McGovern extends his lightness of touch in this second collection, Safe House (Dedalus Press, 86pp, €11.50), to decisively serious matters. Celebrant of his own serio-comic “sacraments” (composing not only an ode to a green shopping bag but also many riffs on remembered moments), he can also edge into a darker, more elegiac, meditative zone – in affecting poems about his parents as well as in a series called “Letters from the Captain” (which in skilful bursts becomes a late big-house novel in miniature). This seriousness can take a political turn, too, touching the complexities of his growing up in the North. Child of Prague, for example, remembers a statue on a window sill, and the collusion of religion and violence:

 

Patron saint of the safe house

you turned a deaf ear to the screech

of tyres late into the night,

vestments cloaking armalite,

orb, a hand grenade.

 

I like such encounters with the darker side, as well as those moments where the verse achieves lyrical lift-off, as in an elegy called The Mower (“Look, he’s back in the seat, / trailing clouds of Sweet Afton; / for the second, sweet cut”). And I relish a poem called The Irish Poem Is – a tour de force making good allusive fun of a category that’s been used and abused in various critical posturing.

Throughout Safe House McGovern is a light-fingered formalist, as his many well-tempered variations on the sonnet demonstrate. But the colloquial ease with which he handles his subjects insists that this formality is never too “poetical”, never an attempt to elevate the importance of himself or his particular take on the world.

Sometimes the poems seem too mild or merely playful for their own good, and the book would have a sharper point without the near-formulaic competence of certain pieces. Yet there’s an undeniable generosity about McGovern’s imaginative world that allows even his few damp squibs to find their place. Light, rarely lightweight, McGovern’s voice is very much his own, and his take on his present and remembered worlds is, at its best, unaffectedly honest, instructive and entertaining.

(from The Irish Times 2011)

 

Review of Safe House (by Richard Hayes)

Somewhat in contrast, Iggy McGovern shows himself a poet very much in control. Safe House, his second collection, is a formally adept and well-rounded book and a pleasure to read. ‘The Women in the Moon’ is a fine poem, in its achievement typical of the collection, charting a life through the women that, at various times, form its centre – the first ‘must put / the food on plates, the clothes on backs’; the second is ahead of you / in everything … But she minds you in the backlane’; the third ‘redeems you from the thrum / of city bars and one-night stands’; the fourth,

 

is merely waiting to

complete the quartet that the heavens

fling into your orbit: she

will always be your little girl,

red apple cheeks and bluebell eyes,

and when she grows you’ll be the one

to sit up till the cows come home,

complaining, watching for the goose-

drawn chariots that ferry her

hither, thither.

 

The first section of the book, loosely autobiographical, offers many strong lyric performances such as this one, including a number of very fine sonnets. ‘Sacraments’ is a sequence (mostly) of sonnets informed by the experience of growing up Catholic in the North. Some of these poems are charming and memorable, like ‘Melchizedek’, where the photograph of a priest in the family disappears, with the young speaker later finding the picture face down in a drawer:

 

He came to visit, brought photographs:

a wife and family, somewhere foreign.

marking orders old and new,

we name him Father Pat-That-Was.

 

The book’s second, short section develops the autobiographical theme and is again formally ambitious. In the sonnet sequence, ‘Letters from the Captain’ the poems take as their basis correspondence between McGovern’s grandfather, who was the gardener of a Big House in Tyrone in the 1930s, and his employer, a Captain Joynson-Wreford. The Captain, dying from TB, wrote to Andy McHugh from Davos, advising on and seeking help with the affairs of his estate and, as McGovern writes in a brief note, ‘providing a moving remembrance of his abandoned home’. The sequence is marvelous, a wonderful imagining of the Captain’s loneliness (in ‘The Umbrella’ he asks, ‘Be with me now in all that lies ahead – /my boon companion, when all hope is fled’), and his sense of loss (in ‘War’ he speculates that ‘some things will not remain: / small courtesies of life, my lost demesne’). The sequence ends with two brilliant poems that bring McGovern himself into the story. In the first, ’Two Cars’, his childhood self finds the Captain’s daughter’s pedal car in a turf shed and steers it down the road, an echo of the Captain’s own (last) departure from the estate in his ‘SS’, ’the touring vehicle consummate’. And in ‘The Pheasants’, McGovern considers the stuffed birds ‘bought for ten shillings at the closing sale’, all that remains of the house.

The third section of Safe House is made up of more occasional verse. It retains McGovern’s wit and style, though some of the poems (‘Proverbs for the Computer Age’, for instance) are rather throwaway. Alone these poems would be of passing interest; here, they pale beside the greater achievements of the earlier sections in the book. The centre of gravity in Safe House is in ‘Letters from the Captain’, worth the cover price alone. But there are many very strong poems in this excellent collection.

from Poetry Ireland Review 103

 

On-line material

http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Literature/People/M/McGovernIggy/

 

 

 

Launch of Safe House, Graduates Memorial Building, Trinity College Dublin