Anthony Weir

Life
b.1941- ; brought to settled in Northern Ireland in his first year; ed. Campbell College; studied philosophy at QUB, without degree; studfied briefly at Univ. of Copenhagen (Sinology); contrib. regularly to The Honest Ulsterman; issued poetry collections, Tide and Undertow: A Book of Translations (1976) and The Transcendental Hotel: Poems for a False Millenium (1997);
 
also some collections jointly with Andi Garwood, viz., Cinema of the Blind (1977), Book Disease (1996) and Fearful Symmetry (1996), as well as The Hell’s Going On (1999) with Tom Baer; issued Early Ireland: A Field Guide (1980), and Images of Lust (1999), a study of the sheela-na-gig of Irish medieval churches in collaboration with James Jerman; lives at Strangford; he manages Dissident editions, and maintains the Beyond-the-Pale website [online].

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Works

Poetry
  • A Century of Quatrains (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1973), [20]pp.
  • Tide and Undertow: A Book of Translations (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1976), [6], 95pp., ill.
  • Cinema of the Blind (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1981), 42pp.
  • Dispatches from the War against the World: Poems (Downpatrick: Dissident Editions 1994), 70pp. [ISBN 095204 510 9]
  • with Andi Garwood, Fearful Symmetry: Poems (Downpatrick: Dissident Editions [1996]), 22pp.
  • The Transcendental Hotel: Poems for a False Millenium (Downpatrick: Dissident Editions 1997) [8], 55pp.
  • Okami [pseud.], Illusions in Three Parts (Downpatrick: Dissident Editions 1998).
Miscellaneous
  • Early Ireland: A Field Guide (Belfast: Blackstaff [1980]), 245pp., ill., maps [ISBN 0856402125]
  • with Tom Baer, The Hell’s Going On (Downpatrick: Dissident Editions [1999]), [28]pp.
  • with James Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches (London: Routledge 1999), 168pp. [04151 515 62], and Do. [pb. edn.] (London: Batsford 1986), 166p, ill., maps.
Journals
  • Translations from the Irish, ‘King Suibhne’s Solitude’, [&c.], in The Honest Ulsterman (Nos. 23, 32 & 33) [see Tom Clyde, ed., Index of Honest Ulsterman, 1995].

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Notes
Dissident: Anthony Weir appears to be the webmaster of Beyond the Pale [online], a site filled with his own poetry including extracts from, or the whole of, Diogenes Sequence. The poem leans towards Zen and Eros and sounds the word ‘dissident’ as a virtual clarion-call - viz., the front page motto: ‘so many people / so little thought / Dissident websites.’ (Or is this disapproval?) It contains a recording of Cavafy reading Waiting for the Barbarians in the original Greek, a youTube link to his own poetry performed in French amid the chink of coffee cups, and also a commemorative page for Tom Matthews [q.v.], c.2004.

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