The lecture looks at the poetry of George Mackay Brown and Patrick Kavanagh through the lens of two key texts by the modernist poet and writer, David Jones: the Preface to The Anathemata and Art and Sacrament. All three writers were Catholic; Brown and Kavanagh were and largely self-taught poetically, born into communities where poverty, danger and hardship were a daily reality. The faith they had in common is inextricably bound up with their poetic vision, in which language becomes the medium used both to express the divine presence and to reaffirm the redemptive workings of God in an immanent and imperfect world.
Hilary Davies has published four collections of poetry from Enitharmon: the latest, Exile and the Kingdom, was published in November 2016. She has won an Eric Gregory award, been a Hawthornden Fellow, Chairman of the Poetry Society, and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at King’s College, London, 2012-16. She is a Fellow of the English Association and sits on an All Party Parliamentary Committee advising government on th e teaching of modern languages in the U.K.
The lecture is free to attend, refreshments to follow.
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