Book Launch: The Thankless Paths to Freedom, by Medbh McGuckian – 13 Feb

“Join us in the launch of Medbh McGuckian’s new collection The Thankless Paths to Freedom (Gallery Press, 2022) in the Great Hall at Queens. Medbh will be in conversation with Padraig Regan, and sharing some poems from the collection.”

Date and Time: Monday 13 Feb at 6.00pm
Venue: The Great Hall at Queen’s University, Belfast

The Thankless Paths to Freedom was conceived in the hiatus between Ireland’s centenary celebrations for the 1916 Rising and the hundred-year anniversary of the setting up of the Northern Irish state in 1921. Images of cells and privation, isolation and penitentiaries, abound.

The poetic persona itself seems to form a prison; landscape and environment are equally enslaved. The dominant Yeatsian muse is Constance Markievicz in her paradoxical history of privilege and sacrifice. As this constantly inventive poet writes, ‘the only way I could // achieve an intentional fall was / to become plural, to reassemble . . . and haunt myself’.

Paul Muldoon says Medbh McGuckian is “one of our most alert and alluring poets” and chose The Thankless Paths to Freedom as one of his books of the year in the Sunday Independent.

Tickets are free but please register.

More information and registration: https://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/seamus-heaney-centre/Events/BookLaunchTheThanklessPathstoFreedombyMedbhMcGuckian.html

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