Kieran Beville

  Michael Hartnett (1941 – 1999) Hartnett's Voice Still Speaks By Kieran Beville I met Michael Hartnett at the Doneraile (North Cork) Writers Weekend in 1981. I travelled there with Willie English in Pád Lysagtht’s car. Willie was a poet and a flamboyant character that regularly frequented the White House Bar. Pád was the owner of the Treaty Press and author of The Comic History of Limerick. I was an aspiring poet. That was the only time Hartnett and I spoke. “A poem,” he said, “should be like a good pint — strong, honest, and without froth.” This is something he said in other contexts too. But let me tell you how this restless poet from Newcastle West gave Ireland a new language for belonging — and why his voice still matters today. In the soft rain of West Limerick, where fields glisten and the air hums with stories, the ghost of Michael Hartnett still walks. His presence lingers not only in the verses he left behind, but in the voices of those who gather each April in ...

  Limerick at the Heart of Irish Poetry April Is Poetry Month 2026 By Kieran Beville Each spring, as April arrives and National Poetry Month is marked across Ireland, Limerick does more than simply join the celebration — it defines it. With the return of April Is Poetry Month 2026 , the city once again asserts itself as a confident, organised and ambitious centre of contemporary Irish poetry. Led and hosted by the Limerick Writers’ Centre, the month-long programme runs from 1–30 April and presents a rich sequence of readings, major book launches, commemorative events and a public poetry installation. Entirely free and open to all, the initiative is both a celebration and a declaration: poetry belongs in Limerick, and Limerick belongs at the centre of Ireland’s literary life. This is not a diffuse arts festival with poetry folded into a broader cultural mix. It is a focused, carefully curated programme dedicated to poetry in its many contemporary forms. For thirty days, th...

  From Limerick to Alexandra The Global Vision of Desmond O’Grady By Kieran Beville Portrait of Desmond O'Grady by Kieran Beville Limerick has produced its share of poets, but few have carried the city’s spirit as far across the world as Desmond O’Grady (1935–2014). Born in Limerick, he grew up near the Shannon in a city that was, in the 1930s and ’40s, still shadowed by poverty but alive with stories, song, and faith. From those modest beginnings, O’Grady became one of Ireland’s most widely travelled and cosmopolitan poets — a man whose work bridged continents and civilisations. Though he is less celebrated than contemporaries such as Seamus Heaney or Derek Mahon, O’Grady’s poetry remains among the most intellectually adventurous of the modern Irish canon. A teacher, translator, and scholar fluent in multiple languages, he wrote from Cairo to Rome, Istanbul to Boston — yet his imagination was never far from Limerick. As he once put it, “I plant my words in borrowed soil, a...

The Spirit of the Maigue Poets Lives On By Kieran Beville Desmond Castle, Adare In the heart of County Limerick, where the River Maigue meanders past fertile meadows and quiet limestone villages, poetry once spoke as fluently as water. The Maigue Poets — or Filí na Máighe — were not figures of distant myth but living, breathing men of the eighteenth century (c.1730-1790): farmers, teachers, tavern keepers, and local scholars who made the Irish language their banner in an age when its survival seemed uncertain. Their stage was not a grand hall or a university lecture room but the parlours and inns of Croom, Bruree, and Kilmallock — small Limerick towns that have since earned a special place in Ireland’s literary geography. Long before Yeats made Sligo shimmer in verse, or Heaney dug meaning from Derry clay, the Maigue Poets turned their patch of Limerick soil into a republic of rhyme. A River and a Community To understand the Maigue Poets, one must begin with the land itself...