Month: November 2015

Western Worlds day at Yeats & the West

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William Butler Yeats, poet, playwright, politician, and Nobel prize-winner for literature, always looked west. The Yeats & the West exhibition at NUI Galway, with rare books, art, music, drama, and film, discovers what the west meant to him, and what this means for us. As part of the Yeats & the West programme, on Friday 27th November the day-long event Western Worlds tells the story of the western cultural revolution that shaped modern Ireland. Featuring talks on W.B.Yeats’s poems, plays, artistic collaborations and love affairs, and featuring his co-conspirators Jack B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Padraic Pearse and Eva Gore Booth, it includes poetry readings, an exhibition highlights tour, and an exclusive interview with the artist John Behan about current exhibitions of Yeatsian-themed sculptures and drawings. Western Worlds tells a story of going west to find those places, real and imaginative, that change our sense of where and who we are.

Western Worlds: A Day at Yeats & the West

Yeats & the West

Bridge Seminar Room, Hardiman Research Building, NUI Galway

Friday 27th November 2015

Entrance to all events is free.

10.45am Welcome (& Kisses)

Adrian Frazier  Yeats & Maud Gonne: The Meaning of Their Kisses

12pm   Poems

Brian Arkins    W.B.Yeats & G.M. Hopkins

Deirdre Ní Chonghaile  ‘Listening to this rude and beautiful poetry’: J.M. Synge as song collector in the Aran Islands

1pm       Lunch

2pm       Plays                                                                      

Barry Houlihan ‘Suffering Spirits and Remorseful Dead’: Remembrance and Re-enactments in the plays of W.B. Yeats

Ian Walsh The Painted Play: Jack B. Yeats and the Postdramatic Theatre

3pm   Revivals

Mary Harris   Realism, Idealism and the Gaelic Revival

Maureen O’Connor   Some Vague Utopia: Eva Gore-Booth’s The Death of Fionavar (1916)

4pm   Coffee

4.30  Arts

Adrian Paterson with Barry Houlihan  (curators of Yeats & the West) Yeats among the Arts: exhibition highlights tour

(from 5pm in Special Collections)

5.30pm   Poems

David Clare & Deirdre Clare   dramatic readings

6.30pm  Reception

7pm   Bulls

John Behan  The Bull of Sheriff Street in conversation

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International Yeats Society comes to Thoor

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From 15th – 18th October 2015 the first annual International Yeats Society conference took place at the University of Limerick. Performances, readings and a wonderful donation of books by Prof Michael Gilsenan to the Glucksman Library were interspersed with conference presentations of the highest quality, setting Yeats in an international context from Japan and India to Russia and Finland, from nationalism to the Noh, in myth and moonlight, craft and creativity, and in conjunction with a dozen arts.

The conference climaxed with a visit on Sunday 18th October by members of the International Yeats Society to Coole Park, the Kiltartan Lady Gregory Museum, and Thoor Ballylee. There they took tea and a tour up the winding stair.

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Members of the International Yeats Society, including conference hosts Professor Margaret Mills Harper, Dana Garvin, and Rick Stoops, plenary speakers Professors Marjorie Howes and Matthew Campbell, and other distinguished delegates from around the world, are joined by members of the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society, including  Sr Mary de Lourdes Fahy, Rena Mcallen, Lelia Doolan, and Dr Adrian Paterson. Deirdre Holmes was behind the camera.

The reopening of Thoor Ballylee for this anniversary celebration of Yeats2015 allows visits like this for the first time in many years. To find out how you can help further click here.

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