Gerard Manley Hopkins Chair in English Literature at JCU

04/04/2017

For those who missed Oliver Rafferty's lecture on Catholic and Protestant interpretations of The Famine. It's trenchant, detailed, but nimble in its complex reading of the 19th century's view of the Famine in religious terms, often in grossly providential terms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0mI3JIqJoc&feature=youtu.be

03/15/2017

Tonight we welcome Sinead Morrissey to JCU! Please come out to her Talk & Poetry Reading at 7 p.m. in Rodman A on John Carroll's campus!

03/07/2017

The countdown is on! We are so excited to welcome Sinead Morrissey to John Carroll's campus next week on Wednesday, March 15th! Join us at 7 p.m. in Rodman A for her talk & poetry reading! Check her out!

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02/21/2017

Check out this lovely poem by Sinead Morrissey who will be visiting John Carroll in less than a month! We cannot wait to welcome this amazing poet!

GENETICS

My father’s in my fingers, but my mother’s in my palms.
I lift them up and look at them with pleasure –
I know my parents made me by my hands.

They may have been repelled to separate lands,
to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers,
but in me they touch where fingers link to palms.

With nothing left of their togetherness but friends
who quarry for their image by a river,
at least I know their marriage by my hands.

I shape a chapel where a steeple stands.
And when I turn it over,
my father’s by my fingers, my mother’s by my palms

demure before a priest reciting psalms.
My body is their marriage register.
I re-enact their wedding with my hands.

So take me with you, take up the skin’s demands
for mirroring in bodies of the future.
I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms.
We know our parents make us by our hands.

02/17/2017

We are getting excited here at JCU to welcome Sinead Morrissey on Wednesday, March 15, 2017 for her Poetry Reading in Rodman A at 7 p.m.

Check out one of Sinead's lovely poems from her collection "Parallax":

Lighthouse

My son’s awake at ten, stretched out along

his bunk beneath the ceiling, wired and watchful.

The end of August. Already the high-flung

daylight sky of our Northern solstice dulls

earlier and earlier to a clouded bowl;

his Star of David lamp and plastic moon

have turned the dusk to dark outside his room.



Across the Lough, where ferries venture blithely

and once a cruise ship, massive as a palace,

inched its brilliant decks to open sea—

a lighthouse starts its own nightlong address

in fractured signalling; it blinks and bats

the swingball of its beam, then stands to catch,

Then hurls it out again beyond its parallax.



He counts each creamy loop inside his head,

each well-black interval, and thinks it just for him—

this gesture from a world that can’t be entered:

the two of them partly curtained, partly seen,

upheld in a sort of boy-talk conversation

no one else can hear. That private place, it answers,

with birds and slatted windows—I’ve been there.

02/06/2017

We are excited to announce the 2017 Gerard Manley Hopkins Chair in English Literature Lecture Series at JCU this Spring!

As a campus, we look forward to welcoming three guest speakers:

Sinead Morrissey of Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland: talk and poetry reading

Wednesday, March 15, 2017 in Rodman A at 7 p.m.

Oliver Rafferty of Boston College: “Famine, Migration, and God”: a lecture on the Great Famine

Wednesday, March 29, 2017 in Rodman A at 7 p.m.

Paul Muldoon of Princeton and The New Yorker: talk and poetry reading.

Monday, April 24, 2017 in Donahue Auditorium at 7 p.m.

These events will help inform students who will be going on our annual peacebuilding and conflict transformation studies in Ireland in May 2017, part of the Peace, Justice and Human Rights program at John Carroll. Additionally, we look to celebrate Irish heritage, history, and literature!