Trevor Joyce



Trevor Joyce (born 26 October 1947) is an Irish poet, born in Dublin.

Life
He co-founded New Writers' Press in Dublin in 1967 and was a founding editor of NWP's The Lace Curtain; A Magazine of Poetry and Criticism in 1968.

He is the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University in 2009/10; a Fulbright Scholar; and a member of Aosdána. He is also co-founder and director of the annual SoundEye Festival that is held in Cork City.

Writing
Early books include Sole Glum Trek (1967), Watches (1968), Pentahedron (1972) and The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976). The last of these is a version of the Middle-Irish Buile Shuibhne, well known from Seamus Heaney's later translation in Sweeney Astray (1983).

After a near-total silence for twenty years, he resumed publishing in 1995 with stone floods, followed by Syzygy and Without Asylum (1998).

Joyce's poetry employs a wide range of forms and techniques, ranging from traditional to modern experimentalism. He has published notable versions from Chinese and from the middle-Irish, which he refers to as "workings" rather than "translations" to emphasize that they are poetic reimaginings in the tradition of Ezra Pound rather than "straight" translations.

A collected poems up to 2000, including his "workings" from the Irish and Chinese, was published as with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold (2001). He has also experimented with web-based poetry projects such as the collaborative project OffSets. A collection of his post-with the first dream work, What's in Store, was published in 2007. A separate collection of new and old translations from the Irish entitled Courts of Air and Earth was issued by Shearsman in 2009.

Recognition
Courts of Air and Earth (Shearsman, 2009) was shortlisted for the Corneliu M Popescu Award for European Poetry in Translation 2009.