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.