Billy Ramsell

Ramsell is of a younger generation which finds many of the established themes of Irish poetry thoroughly exhausted. Technically, Ramsell’s long loose lines would be a comfortable fit with contemporary American mainstream poetic practice. In the Irish tradition, where ideas of what can constitute a technically good poem have been shaped by a hegemony of conservative academics for decades, Ramsell’s forms are an affront to the decorum of a poetic old order.

Yet no matter how hard Ramsell may intend to stray from overt expressions of Irishness, a sense of Irish place often asserts itself in his work, organically, unforced. Encounters with nature in Ramsell’s work such as in ‘An Otter’ are more likely to happen on an urban quayside than in the rural ditch or bog of tradition. The increased urbanisation of Ireland and the peculiar alienation that goes with it (rural life, especially in a depopulated countryside, produces an already well-documented form of alienation) is reflected in its new literature; it is an alienation often accompanied by material wealth and a poverty of the spirit as in Ramsell’s poem ‘Gated Community’.

The Architect’s Dream of Winter was shortlisted for the 2014 Irish Times Poetry Now Award, a prize presented annually to the author of the best collection of poems in English published by an Irish poet in the previous year. Bibliography

Complicated Pleasures, Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2007
The Architect’s Dream of Winter, Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2013

Links
Billy Ramsell’s homepage
Billy Ramsell’s page, with links, on the Munster Literature Centre website
Dedalus Press page for Ramsell
‘Breath’, another poem