Thoor Closing Night 2017

Thoor Ballylee Closing Night 2017

New writers write back to Yeats

Come and join the excitement as Sarah Clancy, Lisa McInerny, and our Thoor ‘write back to Yeats’ competition winners perform.  Mingle with our indomitable songsters and new warblers.
Saturday 7th October 2017
€10 – & refreshments
This is Thoor Ballylee’s season closing event of 2017. Don’t miss out!

Thoor Ballylee extended an open invitation to new (or old) poets for a poem in response to Yeats’s lines a hundred years ago (1938) in his poem ‘Under Ben Bulben’ (edited a little, from Stanza V):

Irish poets, learn your trade
Sing the peasantry and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen…
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry
 W.B. Yeats, from ‘Under Ben Bulben’ (1938)
There will be a modest award for the poem which, in the opinion of the audience, best responds to Yeats’s poem.

Closing Night Saturday 7th October 2017 also features:

Sarah Clancy, author of The Truth and Other Stories. This is Sarah’s third collection of poetry. In it she excavates the personal and psychological wreckage caused by an unrelenting recession in her native Ireland and further afield – with sacrificing the warmth, wit, or linguistic extremity for which she is known.
Lisa McInerney’s first novel The Glorious Heresies won the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2016 Desmond Elliott Prize. Her second novel, The Blood Miracles, was published in April 2017 and she is just finishing her third.  She lives in Gort.