Lunch Series: Celtic Conversations with Stephen Regan
This regular lunch series will feature insights and an engaging presentation from a special guest speaker in our community, over a delicious catered set lunch and the opportunity to connect with fellow club members in a welcoming setting.
This month we welcome to the lunch, Stephen Regan to discuss Irish poetry.
Stephen Regan is Professor Emeritus at Durham University, though he is now based in Melbourne. His books include Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789-1939 and The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of Memory, Mourning and Consolation.
His topic is 'The Politics of Poetry '
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1995, Seamus Heaney famously remarked that 'no lyric has ever stopped a tank’, but he went on to make an impassioned claim for the power of poetry in bringing its own unique perspective to the most challenging political circumstances, and in changing hearts and minds. This talk will ask what special insights contemporary Irish poets have been able to bring to history and politics. It will look at the work of three poets - Ciaran Carson, Eavan Boland and Michael Longley - and it will concentrate on three crucial historical events: the 1798 Rising, the Famine of the 1840s and the Northern Irish Troubles from 1968 onwards.
All in twenty minutes!
*Ticket price includes presentation and insights from our guest speaker and a catered two course set lunch.