Trevor Joyce

What's in Store, now in a second edition (and first UK edition) was Trevor Joyce's first full-length book following the publication of his collected earlier poems, with the first dream of the fire they hunt the cold (2001). For this volume, the author shaped eight years' worth of work - individual poems, extended sequences, translations from the Irish, Chinese, and other languages-into a continuous book-length structure. These poems find Joyce reaching out towards a jarringly wide range of styles and voices, from the tart lyricism of his workings of European folksongs to the ferociously dense collage/inscription of 'STILLSMAN.' Brought together as a book, the poems take on further meanings: What's in Store is at once a Borgesian guide to the history, customs and scientific discourse of an unknown country, and an Oulipian textual machine, whose workings by turns terrify and exalt. "This is one of my favorite poets anywhere. His poems have the clear, austere and impersonal ring of great translations. They are archetypal, they are strange" -Fanny Howe." In a language of chiselled lucidity and deceptive simplicity, Joyce steps through a dazzling range of forms and discursive modes, from translations of folk poetry to the languages of bureaucracy and cult. And through it all, the lyric swerve and shear persists and sings. What's in Store demonstrates conclusively what many have long known: Trevor Joyce is one of a small handful of really significant poets writing from Ireland today." -David Lloyd

Poetry. Translation. The Mutability Cantos have long been recognized as Edmund Spenser's crowning achievement, and along with his unfinished Faerie Queene, of which they appear to be an isolated fragment, they constitute a founding text of English poetry, and of the entire Romantic movement. In FASTNESS, Trevor Joyce gives us a poem which his subtitle describes as A Translation from the English of the Mutability Cantos. His introduction justifies this provocation on historical and poetic grounds. Spenser migrated to Ireland in 1580 and, as administrator and settler colonist, he served as an intrinsic part of England's colonial enterprise, and a participant in its barbarities. It was in his castle at Kilcolman in north County Cork that he wrote most of the Faerie Queene, including the Mutability Cantos, and it was in that Irish landscape that he situated many of the idylls of his epic poem. It was there too that he composed his View of the Present State of Ireland, a prose tract which advocated the conquest of Ireland through a savage policy of scorched earth and induced famine, which provided a model for Cromwell's campaign fifty years after Spenser's death. It is the break made by Cromwell's conquest, and the massacres and ethnic cleansing which accompanied it, that radically alters the meaning of Spenser's text viewed in historical retrospect, and justifies calling FASTNESS a translation. Joyce's poem turns allegory inside out, foregrounding the political narrative which underlies the mythological surface of Spenser's text. The Mutability Cantos grafted Elizabethan colonial politics onto a base of classical mythology. In FASTNESS, Joyce strips out Spenser's poetic dialect, and refits the narrative with modern poetic vernacular, viewing this monument of English culture through four centuries of British imperial and colonial history. Trevor Joyce's superb introduction to his translation of Spenser's English into our English tells us what we need to know about Spenser's time, his method, his politics, Ireland then, and the making of a poetry that is twined around sound, syntax, and sense. This is a bracing book held fast by multitudinous events spinning in unison. We see how the gods behaved towards Earth (a clod of turf in space) savaging her with bad weather. Wild Irish weather from mountains to sea, season to season, day to day: ever mutable. The held-fastness of the words together give indigenous a new poetic meaning.-- Fanny Howe Part of a series of oversettings of Edmund Spenser's work that commenced with Joyce's Rome's Wreck (2014), a monosyllabic 'translation into English' of the sonnet sequence The Ruines of Rome, this new rendering of Spenser's The Mutability Cantos is nothing less than a radical postcolonial Irish poem. In FASTNESS, Joyce gives us back Spenser's language both ruined and revived, as Spenser, the settler colonial official and land- grabber of Kilcolman Castle, Cork, plotted the ruin of Irish culture, language and people. Like Blake's Milton, FASTNESS is Spenser's poetry with sympathy for the devil, a language of Mutability, fast in its vernacular and in its rollicking narrative, and holding fast, as Joyce always does, to the ample resources of the language that its ruination reveals. Read, and enjoy the ride.--David Lloyd

The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry brings lesser-known Irish voices to an American audience. In this fourth volume, editor David Wheatley, himself an established poet and critic, has selected poetry by Trevor Joyce, Aidan Mathews, Peter McDonald, Ailbhe Darcy, and Ailbhe N Ghearbhuigh. Each section is introduced with an essay by Wheatley which offers some background, context, and critical illumination. As Wheatley writes in his preface, "Irish poetry is a peregrine entity, making and manifesting itself in a wide variety of ways, in and out of Ireland, and as a book of Irish poetry edited by a Scotland-based Irishman and published in the US, this volume enters the marketplace from another angle again. The balance of power between Dublin, Belfast, London, and other traditional publishing centers is not a primary concern of this book, however. Instead, I sidestep questions of generational groups and territoriality to explore a series of related but distinct issues, as focused on these five poets' distinguished bodies of work."

This Selected provides an overview of Trevor Joyce's multifaceted poetic career and covers some 45 years of work. The books appears simultaneously with the first major scholarly volume devoted to his work.

"Courts of Air and Earth" is a collection of Trevor Joyce's translations from the Old and Middle Irish, with his remarkable version of the epic "Poems of Sweeny, Peregrine", at the core. Also included are a series of "Love Songs from a Dead Tongue", versions of "Sean O Duibher of the Glen", and selections from the "Danta Gradha".

This extraordinary collection brings together the entirety of his work up0 to 2003 that Trevor Joyce wishes to preserve. Founder of the seminal New Writers' Press in Dublin, Joyce is Ireland's most stimulating late-modernist poet, unrepentantly engaging the global modernist tradition at a time when it would seem to many that Irish writers, whether in the Republic or the orphaned north, prefer to hunker down and be parochial. The book includes the early collections Sole Glum Trek, Watches and Pentahedron and the splendid re-working of of the Buile Suibhne epic The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine, as well as the later masterworks Stone Floods and Syzygy, the former nominated for the 1995 Irish Times Literary Award for Poetry, the latter a formal tour-de-force previously only available as a limited edition chapbook. The volume concludes with more recent uncollected work of great power and ambition. This is the second edition, in a slightly larger format, of a book first published in 2001 with the ISBN 0-907562-29-9.