James Finnegan (poet)

James Finnegan is a poet and former schoolteacher. His work has appeared in publications such as New Hibernia Review, Cyphers, Poetry Ireland Review and The Irish Times.[1][2]

James Finnegan

Ph.D
Native name
Séamus Ó Fionnagáin
BornDublin, Ireland
OccupationSchoolteacher
SpouseLivinia

Born in Dublin, he has a Ph.D in living educational theory.[1][2] His father was a foster child, reared in Inverin by an uncle and aunt without progeny of their own, and engendered in his son "a love of the sea/of spoken Irish and Connemara".[1] He also had family in Gort.[1] He lives close to the County Donegal town of Letterkenny, and spent many decades teaching at St Eunan's College.[1] Remarkably, given his interests and background, he taught neither English nor Irish, but science. He has married Livinia, to whom he refers in his work.[1]

The Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award has "highly commended" his work.[1] Two of his poems won the Irish Times Hennessy Literary Award for New Irish Writing in February 2018.[2] He was shortlisted in the "Emerging Poetry" category in 2019, the final year of the award.[3] He published his first collection — titled Half-Open Door — in 2018, with a foreword by Aosdána member Thomas McCarthy which draws attention to Finnegan's use of double spacing within poems - a Black Mountain poets technique called "the open field".[1][4] Half-Open Door was launched at the Listowel Writers' Week on 1 June 2018.[5] Among those cited as influences by reviewers and by James Finnegan are Raymond Carver, T. S. Eliot, Günter Grass, Seamus Heaney, Primo Levi, Michael Longley, Czesław Miłosz, Charles Wright, Mary Oliver, Wisława Szymborska, Alice Oswald, Siegfried Sassoon and Tomas Tranströmer.[1][6] Animals appear often, leading one reviewer to claim that his cat Elsie "has earned a place in the pantheon of cats in Irish poetry alongside Pangur Bán and Yeats's Minnaloushe".[1] All going well, Doire Press will publish a second collection of poems from James Finnegan in 2022.

References
  1. Hopkin, Alannah (29 September 2018). "Considered work that takes time to reveal its quiet humour". Irish Examiner. Born in Dublin, and now living near Letterkenny, where he taught at St Eunan's College, his biographical note tells us that he holds a doctor of philosophy in living education theory.
  2. "Hennessy New Irish Writing: February 2018, winning poems by James Finnegan". The Irish Times. 24 February 2018. Archived from the original on 24 February 2018.
  3. Doyle, Martin (28 March 2019). "Mike McCormack joins Hall of Fame as Hennessy ends sponsorship after 48 years". The Irish Times.
  4. Andrews, Kernan (5 July 2018). "EM Reapy to read at Over The Edge: Eamonn Wall, Mary O'Donoghue, and James Finnegan to also read". Galway Advertiser. Archived from the original on 6 August 2018. James Finnegan, whose first full collection of poems, Half-Open Door, was published recently by Eyewear Publishing…
  5. "At the Edge". Archived from the original on 11 June 2019. His first full collection of poems, Half-Open Door, is published by Eyewear Publishing and was launched in Listowel on June 1st 2018.
  6. O'Sullivan, Maeve (Jan 12, 2018). "The Word as Trampoline". Dublin Review of Books. Archived from the original on 13 June 2019.


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