About the Author:
For fifty years, since publication of his first book in 1967, Trevor Joyce has been a unique voice in Irish writing. His books include WITH THE FIRST DREAM OF FIRE THEY HUNT THE COLD (New Writers' Press, 2001), COURTS OF AIR AND EARTH (Shearsman Books, 2006), What's in Store (New Writers' Press & The Gig, 2007), and SELECTED POEMS 1967-2014 (Shearsman Books, 2014). Rome's Wreck (Cusp Books, 2014) is a translation under constraint from the English of Edmund Spenser's Ruines of Rome. Joyce co-founded, in Dublin, the New Writers' Press and its journal The Lace Curtain in the late sixties, and then the annual SoundEye Festival in Cork in the nineties. He has been included in representative anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry and Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press). He was a Fulbright Scholar in 2002/3 and served as Visiting Fellow in Poetry to the University of Cambridge in 2009/10. He was elected to Aosdána, the Irish affiliation of artists, in 2004, and has been awarded in Italy the 2016 N.C. Kaser Poetry Prize.
Review:
Joyce transforms Spenser's strange archaic diction ... into an unstable and dislocated mixture of a register which connotes tradition and contemporary demotic English. The lines are contorted as if wrenched out of shape, drawing attention to the poetic labour of the translator's work, the odd process of updating an unfamiliar classic, and the violent process of colonial occupation.
Here, the process seems to work exceptionally well and the effect of reading Fastness is often disturbing and invigorating, forcing a reader familiar with Spenser to ask whether they have read him carefully enough, or a reader who has no real idea what he writes to wonder at what level to engage with the Elizabethan poet.
-- Andrew Hadfield, PN Review
Fastness nevertheless remains a provocative poem which made me think anew about the many poetic idioms of The Faerie Queene.... Joyce's version has the effect of making you reread the Cantos in the light of an almost wholly different poetic praxis, largely antipathetic to Spenserian styles and registers. For me, this experience reinforces my sense that though much of The Faerie Queene may be formulaic, often it is not, and often - when Spenser is at his most literary, he is also at his most pointed. Joyce's excisions and deviations from The Mutabilitie Cantos therefore tell us much about the differences between contemporary and Elizabethan poetry, but they also underline the ways in which Spenser wrote imagistically and directly about the world in which he lived.
-- Richard Danson Brown, The Spenser Review
We are beyond the realm of traditional understandings of the act of translation as a simple exchanging of one language for another in the rendering of a story or a poem. Not unironically, and surely not unintentionally, the mutability of language, and the Mutability of the poem, are connected. This is a layered book, the fruits of an extraordinary labour, and it requires of its reader something other than the merely cursory... The language is as tightly wound in Joyce's translation as the baroque, high allegorical of Spenser's original. There is nothing sloppy or accidental about the choices or the gaps (even seeming rifts) between the language Joyce employs to render Spenser anew.
-- David Toms, Headstuff
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.