Chris Agee


Life
1956- ; b. San Francisco, brought up in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island; ed. Andover, Harvard and Université d’Aix-en-Provence, with degrees in English; teaches Open Univ., moved to Northern Ireland in 1979, living in Belfast; m. Nóirín McKinney; Board of Directors of Poetry Ireland, chosen [with another] by Irish Writers’ Centre to represent Ireland in Russian exchange;
 
ed. Special North American Issue of Poetry Ireland; short-listed for Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize (US) for own collection, In the New Hampshire Woods (1992); suffered the death of his dg. Miriam in 2001 and issued Next to Nothing (2009), a collection dealing with that event and its sequel; ed. Irish Double Issue of Poetry (Chicago 1995); he edited the ‘American Issue’ of Metre (Spring 2000), and edits Irish Pages: Journal of Contemporary Writing (from 2002), in Belfast.

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Works
Collections
  • In the New Hampshire Woods (Dublin: Dedalus 1992).
  • The Sierra de Zacatecas/ha Sierra de Zacatas [Editiones Popeles Privados] (Mexico City 1995), 22pp., ill. by Alfonso Lopez Monreal [cover].
  • First Light (Dublin: Dedalus Press 2003), 96pp.
  • Next to Nothing (Salt Publishing 2009), 123pp.
 
Selected poems
  • “In the New Hampshire Woods”, Poetry Ireland Review (Spring 1989), pp.8-9 [a poem in 12 parts], rep. as In the New Hampshire Woods (1992), infra.
  • “Tidelands”, Poetry Ireland Review (Spring 1992), pp.100-01 [a poem in 9 short parts].
  • “Old Sarajevo”, in Ken Smith & Judi Benson, eds., Klaonica, Poems for Bosnia (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1993), p.56.
  • “Turas”, in Studies, 82, 328 (Winter 1993), p.383.
  • “New Poems”, in Éire-Ireland, 29, 2 (Summer 1994), pp.42-50 [“Turas”; “Seán MacBride, 1903-1988”; “Old Sarajevo”; “Mandelstam”; “At Six”; “Peredelkino”; “Flag-Irish”; “The Sierra de Zacatecas”; “Low Tide on Trá na Rossan”].
  • “Occam’s Rime” [poems], in Times Literary Supplement (16 Feb. 2001), p.6.
  • “At Bethlehem Nursery: In memoriam Miariam Aoife Agee, 1997-2001”, in Times Literary Supplement (23 Aug. 2002) [infra].
  • “Miracle Story”, in SHR [Southern Humanities Review] (Winter 2004) [a story].
 
Miscellaneous
  • ed., Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia, [literal trans. Antonela Glavinic and Igor Klikovac] (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1998), 208pp.
  • review of Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, in The Irish Times (30 Dec. 2006), Weekend [infra].

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Quotations
“At Bethlehem Nursery: in memorlam Miriam Aoife Agee, 1997-2001”: ‘The frost this morning was thick, Byzantine, / Coating an infinite wicker of grass leaves, blades of daffodil, / Old November leaves curled like lips of conch, / Side-view mirror fingered clear in the early morning // Eternally new. Quintessential Irish, unvanquished bluish-white / Under sleepers of shadow on sun-warmed verges, / The visitation, the annunciation of night - fog’s delicate lacework / Breathed out by the Gulf Stream’s circumpolar Ariel.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 23 Aug. 2002.)

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