Monasterevin Hopkins Society Annual Festival
Fri. 29th & Sat. 30th July 2016
Fri. 29th.
Venue: Moore Abbey
Courtesy of The Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary and the Muiriosa Foundation.
7.30 pm 2016 Inaugural Lecture:
Dr R. K. R. (Kelsey) Thornton:
Co-editor of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volumes I and II: Correspondence, Oxford University Press 2013
‘‘Peanuts’: the Making of the Collected Hopkins ”.
“Some of the amusing, and intriguing insights into Hopkins’s mind, discovered in editing his Correspondence, and a new account of his progress to the ‘Wreck’.”
8.30 pm Moore Abbey Concert (Program Change)
Emer Dunne will sing from her wide repertoire of music and songs including an extensive selection of classical, contemporary, gospel, and Irish traditional songs.
Tickets €10 available from: Earley’s Fashion Shop, Main St., Monasterevin & O’Rourke’s Allcare Pharmacy, Shopping Centre,Rathangan Rd., Monasterevin or at the door.
Sat. 30th
Venue: Moore Abbey
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10.00 am Lecture:
Ms Niamh Brown:
”Hopkins’s Energetic Anxiety”
This paper will consider Hopkins’s writing in the light of nineteenth-century developments of the laws of thermodynamics. It will explore his attempts to reconcile a finite universe with an eternal God.
11.00 am Coffee
11.30 am Lecture:
Dr Anne-Marie Millim:
“Productive Emotion in Hopkins’s Diary”
This paper argues that Hopkins’s diaristic writing can be seen as a strategy of making his personal desires productive by turning them into the praise of God and his creatures.
12.30 pm Lunch
2.00 pm Lecture:
Professor Brian Cosgrove:
“From Dawn to Dusk: Versions of Nature in Hopkins and Thomas Hardy”
Hopkins’s Christian belief, as in his celebration of the “Cosmic Christ” in “The Windhover” is less representative of Victorian poetry rather than Hardy’s lack of faith. “The Darkling Thrush”, written towards the end of the Victorian era, is more typical of a culture in which the term “agnostic” was first introduced (in 1869).
After this paper we depart for Monasterevin House, Main Street, Monasterevin where Hopkins spent vacations as a guest of the Cassidy family for the Poetry Reading.
Venue: Monasterevin House
By kind permission of the Presentation Sisters.
3.30 pm Poetry Reading by Richard Halperin
Richard W. Halperin’s most recent volume of poetry is Quiet in a Quiet House. It concerns people and places of the past. Nature is interrupted by keening, laughter and rants. Memory is an important theme and people are presented as souls.
4.00 pm My Favourite Hopkins Poem
Participants will be invited to read their favourite Hopkins Poem.
4.30 pm Poetry Reading by Kate Dempsey and Paddy Bushe (Program Addition)
Admission Fees:
Weekend All (7) Events: €30
Fri. All (2) Events: €10
Sat. All (5) Events: €20
Fri. 29th, Lecture: €5
Fri. 29th, Concert: €10
Sat. 30th, 2 Morning Lectures : €10
Sat. 30th, Afternoon Lecture & Poetry Reading: €10
Sat. 30th, Poetry Reading: €5
Singer, Lecturers, Poet
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Kelsey Thornton was Professor of English Literature and Head of Department at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne until 1989 and then at the University of Birmingham until 2000. He wrote The Decadent Dilemma (1983) about the English 1890s and edited the Penguin Poets of the ‘Nineties (1970, 1997). and edited a series of 26 reprints under the title ‘Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents’ (1993-96). He has edited work by Nicholas Hilliard, John Clare, Ivor Gurney (including 20 volumes of the Ivor Gurney Society Journal) and Wilfrid Gibson. He wrote a small book on Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1973, arranged the exhibition and book of Hopkins’s drawings, All My Eyes See (1975), and his edition (with Catherine Phillips) of Hopkins’s Correspondence was awarded the Morton Cohen Prize by the MLA this year. Apart from his editing, he is poet and translator and keen watercolourist. |
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Emer Dunne is a versatile professional who sings a variety of genres and is also classically trained with renowned singer, Dr. Veronica Dunne, in the Leinster School of Music. Possessing a very natural talent, Emer’s sound has been described as one of the most clear and beautiful voices to emerge on the Irish music scene. |
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Niamh Brown is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is writing her thesis on devotional cosmologies in Victorian popular science and devotional poetry. Her other research interests include nineteenth-century almanacs and Neo-Victorianism in geek culture. |
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Dr Anne-Marie Millim is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Luxembourg. She gained her Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow in 2009 and has published on Victorian diaries, celebrity culture and the role of literature in nation-building. |
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Brian Cosgrove, Professor Emeritus of NUI Maynooth, and head of the English Department there from 1992 until retirement in 2006, has published various articles, as well as books on Wordsworth and Joyce. He has a particular interest in the interactions between literature (e.g., Hopkins’s poetry) and philosophy/theology. |
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Richard W. Halperin’s work has been widely published since 2005, especially in THE SHOP, Cyphers, Revival Literary Journal, The Stinging Fly (featured poet, summer 2009), Ambit, Carillon, The Delinquent, Obsessed with Pipework. His debut collection is Anniversary (Salmon, 2010). A Japanese version appeared in 2012 (Sakiko Tagaki, translator; Kundai Bungei-sha Press, Tokyo, 2012). Several poems have been honoured in competitions in Ireland, the U.K. and Italy, including two 2012 first-prize poems in the present book. Mr. Halperin gave his first reading at Glenstal Abbey and has since read throughout Ireland, including at the Guinness Book of Records marathon, Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin. Prior to retirement as Chief of Section, UNESCO, he editedReading and Writing Poetry (Paris, 2005), available gratis via the internet. He is currently working on a third collection Quiet in a Quiet House. |
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Kate Dempsey is from Coventry and studied Physics at Oxford University. She lived and worked in the UK, Nijmegen, The Netherlands and Albuquerque, New Mexico before settling in Ireland. She has lived in Maynooth, County Kildare with her family for more than twenty years. Prizes for her writing include The Plough Prize, Cecil Day Lewis Award, shortlisting for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award for both Poetry and Fiction and two commendations for the Patrick Kavanagh Award. She was nominated for the Forward Prize and selected to read for Poetry Ireland Introductions. She runs the Poetry Divas, a collective of women poets who blur the wobbly boundary between page and stage at events and festivals all over Ireland. The Space Between is her debut full-length poetry collection. |
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Paddy Bushe was born in Dublin in 1948 and now lives in Waterville, Co. Kerry.. A prize-winning poet in Irish and in English, his collections include Poems With Amergin (1989), Teanga (1990), Counsellor (1991), Digging Towards The Light (1994), In Ainneoin na gCloch (2001), Hopkins on Skellig Michael (2001) and The Nitpicking of Cranes (2004). To Ring in Silence: New and Selected Poems was published in 2008. He edited the anthology Voices at the World’s Edge: Irish Poets on Skellig Michael (Dedalus, 2010). His latest collection is My Lord Buddha of Carraig Eanna (Spring, 2012). The recipient of the Oireachtas prize for poetry in 2006, he also received the 2006 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award. He is a member of Aosdána. |
Call for Papers
The Monasterevin Hopkins Society is always interested in promoting scholarship on Hopkins, Literature and all things Hopkinsian. We invite people interested in presenting a paper at our festival to contact us.
Enquiries: info@monasterevinhopkinssociety.org
Patrons, Corporate Associates and Sponsors:
| Patron: | Michael Habenicht and Schlotter Ireland |
| Corporate Associates: | William Carmody and Mason Hayes & Curran |
| Sponsors: | Moore Abbey and Muiriosa Foundation Presentation Generalate Kildare County Council |