Poetry Ireland is delighted to host American poet Jane Hirshfield for a rare appearance in Dublin. Jane’s insightful explorations of the intersection of all things have made her one of the world’s most accomplished writers. Jane will be in conversation with another legendary poet, Ireland’s beloved Paula Meehan.

The poets will read from and take part in a broader discussion about their work facilitated by poet and Irish Times Poetry Editor Gerard Smyth.

Jane Hirshfield, among the foremost American poet-spokespersons for the biosphere, is the 2022 Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellow at Queen's University, Belfast. The author of several now-classic collections of essays, anthologies, and translations and nine volumes of poetry, most recently Ledger (Knopf, 2020), her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, The Poetry Center Book Award, California Book Award, short-listing for England's T.S. Eliot Award,  et al. Her work appears in The New Yorker, TLS, The New York Times, The Irish Times, The Guardian, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poems. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she was elected in 2019 into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The Asking: New & Selected Poems will appear from Knopf (US) in 2023 and Bloodaxe (UK) in 2024.

Paula Meehan was born and raised in the north inner city of Dublin. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and at Eastern Washington University in the U.S. Her work has garnered both critical and popular acclaim. She has received the Butler Literary Award for Poetry presented by the Irish American Cultural Institute, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award for Dharmakaya, published in 2000, The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry 2015, a Cholmondelay Award in 2017 for Geomantic, and the PPI Award for Radio Drama. Dedalus Press has republished Mysteries of the Home, a selection of seminal poems from the 1980s and the 1990s. Her poetry has been set to music by artists of the avant garde as well as folksingers, and many poems have been scored for choirs. She has collaborated with choreographers, visual artists and film makers throughout her working life. She was honoured with election to Aosdána, the Irish Academy for the Arts, in 1996. She was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2013 – 2016, and her public lectures from these years, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, was published by UCD Press in 2016. Her Collected Poems was published in 2020.

Gerard Smyth was born in Dublin in 1951 and began publishing poetry in the late 1960s when his first poems were published by David Marcus in the New Irish Writing Page of The Irish Press and by James Simmons in The Honest Ulsterman. Smyth worked all his professional life as a journalist with The Irish Times with responsibility for arts coverage, most recently as the newspaper’s poetry editor. He was elected a member of Aosdana in May 2009. In 2011 he received the O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. He is co-editor, with Pat Boran, of If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song (Dedalus Press).