2007 News
- News Archive
SMUC Poet Awarded
Conor Carville, a lecturer from St Mary's University College, Twickenham has been presented with the 2007 Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. The award is for the best collection of 20 poems by a poet who has not yet published a book.
The ceremony took place in November at the official opening of The Annual Patrick Kavanagh Weekend in the poet's native village of Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan, Ireland.
The judges were poet and broadcaster Theo Dorgan, author of three collections of poetry, most recently Sappho's Daughter (Train Press, 1998) and the poet Paula Meehan author of five books of poetry, most recently Dharmakaya (Carcanet, 2000).
The judge's comments on Conor Carville's manuscript were:
These are poems of considerable intelligence and craft, wide-ranging in subject matter, vivid and lively in their music. The world in which we say we live is interrogated, re-shaped, and given back to us in poems that alert us to the beautiful and unexpected strangeness of things. The poet's awareness ranges from scientific theory to the taste of seaweed, but we are never abandoned in a world of fragments; the real joy of the collection is the satisfying sense it gives us that this is a whole world, seen clearly and joyfully by a grateful integrating awareness.
The surface of the poems shimmers with a kind of electrical charge, a force field all their own. Here is a sure and cadenced music, the music of what happens in family, in work, in landscape, in transience. They manage the delicate balancing act of being full of noise and yet creating pools of silence and reflection. There's a dexterous ludic imagination at work here, with allusions both varied and rich ranging from Motown to Minerva.
He succeeds in collapsing the increasingly digitized present moment into forms and occasions that are both ancient and enduring. As readers we were exhilarated and transported. This power to shift the ground of being is the true mark of a poet. We were left hungry for more.
