Event - Rome - 27 March 2017

Performing Poetry: 

Featuring: Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin  and Neal Hall 

Palazzo Firenze, Presso la ‘Loggia del Prima ciclo, Rome, Italy

Time: 4.30pm - 6.30pm;  3.27.2017

Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin:

An Irish poet, translator, and editor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin earned a BA and MA at University College Cork and also studied at Oxford University. Ní Chuilleanáin is described as " a truly imaginative poet, whose imagination is authoritative and transformative. She leads readers into altered or emptied landscapes. Each poem is a world complete, and often they move between worlds.  These are potent poems, with dense, captivating sound and a certain magic that proves not only to be believable but necessary, in fact, to our understanding of the world around us.”

She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Acts and Monuments (1966), which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award; The Magdalene Sermon(1989), which was selected as one of the three best poetry volumes of the year by the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Poetry Book Prize Committee; Selected Poems (2009); and The Sun-fish (2010), which won the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her The Boys of Bluehill (2015) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.  Ní Chuilleanáin’s work has been featured in several anthologies, including The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry, 1967-2000 (1999, edited by Peggy O’Brien). Since 1975 she has edited the literary magazine Cyphers, and she has also edited Poetry Ireland Review. She has taught at Trinity College Dublin since 1966. 

Neal Hall, M.D., Nealhallpoet.com

Neal Hall was formally trained as a medical-surgical eye physician and graduate of Cornell and Harvard Universities.  He is an internationally acclaimed poet.  Cornel West of the US, said of Dr. Hall “ [he] is a warrior of the spirit, a warrior of the mind, an activist, a poet. I sense Dr. Hall’s hypersensitivity to suffering – Martin, Malcolm and Jesus all had this hypersensitivity. Both sides of his soul have prophetic leanings. His poetry has the capacity to change ordinary people’s philosophy on social and racial issues.” Dr. Hall’s poetry speaks not just to the surface pain of injustice and inhumanity but deep into that pain, we label and package into genteel socio-political-economic-religious constructs to blur the common lines of cause, that is our shared story. A shared story that should unite us in a common struggle to be free. India’s Vasanth Kannabiran, Chairperson, Asmita Resource Centre for Women, remarked: ‘ This is poetry that scalds you into waking up to the possibility that you are perhaps one of those silent spectators. All in all he is a poet. And unquestionably one of the most significant voices of the century. ‘

Dr. Hall is an award-winning author of several books of poetry: Nigger For Life,  Winter’s A’ Coming Still, Where Do I Sit., Appalling Silence - selections of his work  translated into Telugu and Urdu and published in India. He has just completed his 5th book, Door of No Return. His work has been translated into 4 additional languages: Bengali, Kannada, German and Italian. It is currently being translated into Japanese.