Reading at PoetryFest, Irish Arts Centre, New York City

I’m delighted to be reading at this year’s PoetryFest, which takes place between the 2nd and 4th of November at the Irish Arts Centre, New York City. This annual event, currently curated by Nick Laird, has featured some extraordinary poetic talent, from both sides of the Atlantic, over the past decade.

It’s a special thrill to for me be reading with the wonderful Nicole Sealey.

The festival is also graced by readings from Ben Lerner and Vona Groarke,
from Natalie Diaz and Annemarie Ní Churreáin, from Maureen McLane and Michelle O’Sulivan, and from Ciaran Carson and Marie Howe.

Also featuring are the ever-popular ‘Favourite Irish Poems’ and ‘Desert Island Poems’ events.

This is a trip I’m very much looking forward to.

Review of ‘Il sogno d’inverno dell’architetto’ on Poesia

 

Billy Ramsell, “credo che uno scrittore possa imparare molto dalla musica”

 

This summer saw the publication, in Italian translation, of my second collection, The Architect’s Dream of Winter. It was a dream come true to see this book, ably translated by Lorenzo Mari as Il sogno d’inverno dell’architetto, make its way into the world.

And I’m delighted  to see it reviewed here, on the popular Poesia website, by esteemed writer and critic Giovanni Agnoloni.  Mr Agnoloni has graciously translated the opening of his review, which reads as follows:

Billy Ramsell’s poetry, in this excellent collection marvellously translated into Italian by Lorenzo Mari (who is also the editor of the series of books “L’altra lingua”), proceeds on a bordering territory consisting of several splinters of contemporary world, projected onto the stylistic level and, mostly, onto that of contents. It is a fragmented and syncopated chant of a modernity filled with technology, a reflection of a world broken up in numberless facets, but also produced by the re-elaboration of the legacy of the great Twentieth century masters of Irish poetry (above all, William Butler Yeats). Their contemplative spirit breathes here, filtered by the author’s sensitivity, through gashes opened onto metropolitan solitudes soaked with jazz notes or hurlers’ movements, with their loose solfeggio and rattling sticks beating the time of a totally intimate prosody.

…

Billy Ramsell moves around the poetical forms with ease, combining his verses with brief prose pages, through which he goes deeper into the meanders of the intrinsic paradoxes of our time. The poet seems to have interiorly recorded and then reproduced on an imaginary stave the disconnected notes of the background noise of our historical season, filled with often-aborted attempts of computerised communication, but also with lyrical outbursts that seem to consume their intensity right upon being conceived. And not for a limit of their own, but because even regret and lyrical yearnings are luxury, when everything around proceeds so fast. Yet, that brief moment remains, emitting, in its quasi-instantaneousness, a longing for eternity that tends to persist, at least in intimate memories, as the effect of a music interpretation lasting – in the external world – just the time of a performance.

 

The full text, in Italian, along with an interview Mr Agnoloni conducted with me during his recent trip to Ireland, can be found here. My thanks to Giovanni, to Luigia Sorrentino, curator of the Poesia site and, as always, to my translator Lorenzo Mari.

Giovanni Angoloni, writer, critic, translator and Fiorentina fan.