Focus on Galician Poetry

Galicia and Ireland share legends, climate, music, culture and even chromosomes, or so it is said. The Instituto Cervantes joins St. Patrick’s Festival to celebrate the patron saint’s day with the reading and discussion of poetry in Galician, Spanish and English. The Galician language writer Manuel Rivas and his translator into English Lorna Shaughnessy, will read poems for the author’s most recently published collection The Mouth of the Earth (Shearsman Press, 2019). The event will be hosted by editor Tony Frazer.

For Manuel Rivas, words are the most sensitive of creatures. Rivas’ poems urge us to look more closely at the wake of what has passed, and to peer long and hard into the fog of the present. He evokes memory as a source of both nostalgia and future, and it has been a predominant theme in all his writing. Manuel Rivas has been published in English both in poetry (From Unknown to Unknown, The Disappearance of Snow) and prose.

Lorna Shaughnessy has published four poetry collections. Her translation of Manuel Rivas’ The Disappearance of Snow (Shearsman Press) was shortlisted for the Popescu Prize in European Poetry Translation in 2014. She lectures in Hispanic Studies in NUI, Galway.

Sit comfortably and enjoy the reading.