Details revealed for Monasterevin Hopkins Festival 2023

Following the Covid 19 enforced confinement of the past two years the Monasterevin Hopkins 2023 Festival Committee has a line up of top flight Hopkins contributors retained for this year’s festival which commences on Friday, July 28 and runs throughout that weekend.

Prior to the Covid forced incarceration a popular element of the festival was the Arts and Crafts event which attracted artisans and artists from near and far exhibiting hundreds of pieces of their work.

The event which is the brainchild of Sr. Ann Scully, Monasterevan Convent of Mercy, and curated by her, will be opened on Friday afternoon , July 28 at 4.00pm in the local Monasterevin Community Centre.

Following the Opening Ceremony the first of the lectures of the weekend will be delivered by Irene Kyffin, vice-chairperson of the Monasterevin Hopkins Society. Irene is a distinguished Hopkins Scholar and has lectured on the subject for many years at many venues.

However on this occasion she will be delivering a lecture entitled “Geometric Abstraction”. This talk explores the birth of the art form, Geometric Abstraction from its roots in Constructivism-from which it takes an alternative name: Systematic

Constructivism.

Irene came to the UK from Ireland in her late teens. She began her

studies in her late 30s, took a degree in teaching Speech and Drama and

went on to do a Masters in Social Anthropology. Irene has taught in Prmary,

Secondary and Further Education sectors and lectured at University.

She devised a programme, The Nature of Hopkins with the famous jazz

pianist Stan Tracey. Hopkins poems were read as jazz/poetry fusion and this

programme was presented at Literature Festivals in the UK. She has written

and presented many papers on Hopkins at conferences in the USA, UK,

Ireland and Nepal.

Over the past number of years one of the features of the festival has

been the annual concert which has featured many well known singers.

And this high standard will be maintained when tenor Dominic McGorian

will be the star attraction. The venue for this year’s concert St. John’s

Church, Main Street, which has been made available through the good

offices of the Church of Ireland community. This will be the second

occasion for Dominic to feature at a Hopkins Festival and judging by his

first performance he should attract a full house.

Then on Saturday morning the first lecture “Hopkins and Himself” In

Monasterevan Community Centre commencing at 10.00am will be

delivered by Anna J. Nickerson. She is the Katherine Jex-Blake, Research

Fellow and College Lecturer in English at Girton College, University of

Cambridge.

Her first monograph, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Intellectual Life, is

forthcoming with Bloomsbury for their new series Studies in Poetry and

Philosophy. She is co-editor of Walter de la Mare: critical appraisals (2022)

and she has written on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature for

Essays in Criticism, Victorian Poetry, the Cambridge Quarterly,Philosophy and

Literature, and Religion and Literature.

The second lecture which is entitled “Fosterer: the influence of Gerard

Manley Hopkins on the poetry of Seamus Heaney”, will be delivered by

Gary Wade. He graduated from Durham University with a PhD in English

Literature in 2021, where he worked on a Catholic sensibility in the poetry

of Seamus Heaney. He was Warden of Trinity Hall (St. Chad’s College)

between 2018 and 2021.He also holds a Master’s degree in Classical

Reception from University College London , and in Theology from the

University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. He is currently working on a

monograph entitled Seamus Heaney and Catholicism and on an essay

“Moving in Step: Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh” to be included in

the forthcoming “The Frontier of Writing: A Study of Seamus Heaney’s

Prose”, to be published by Routledge in 2024.

Gary is Assistant Chaplain at Haileybury College in Hertfordshire.

At 2.30 in the afternoon the venue will be Monasterevin House which is

the Head House of the Presentation Order of Nuns and where Hopkins

spent his vacations as a guest of the Miss Cassidys.

In charge of the proceedings here will be the poet, Pat Boran, winner of

the Patrick Kavanagh award for Poetry in 1989 and the US based Lawrence

O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award. He has also published more than a dozen

books on poetry and prose. Pat, a native of Portlaoise, is a former editor

of Poetry Ireland Review and over the years he has received a number of

Arts Council Bursaries and travel awards and has represented Ireland at

poetry and literary festivals across Europe. His books have been translated

into many languages including Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, French, Greek

and Georgian.

The day will conclude with the popular “My Favourite Hopkins Poem”

when the audience will have the opportunity to recite their favourite

from Hopkins repertoire.