James Byrne’s
most recent book of poems is Everything Broken Up Dances, published in
2015 by Tupelo.
He is Senior Lecturer in poetry at Edge
Hill University,
where he and I were colleagues and collaborators on more than this Croatian
poet. (For example, the anthology Atlantic Drift which
was published by Arc and EHUP, and which may be read about here.) James was
also a moving force behind the Sheppard Symposium (more of that later
this year). Here he is reading at that event:
This
Wikipedia Page is pretty much up to date, and gives a good sense of James's international range and profile:
As
is his Edge Hill page:
During
our time at Edge Hill we shared a lot of good things (times) and other things
(and times) and I trust we will continue to collaborate and plot. And lift a
few more beers…As we are here to celebrate, not Twitters, but Atlantic Drift...
There is no resultant ‘Europoem’,
but a variety of styles that reflects the collaborative nature of the poems’
production, the richness of a continent. The works range from the comedic to
the political, from the imaginatively sincere to the faux-autobiographical,
from traditional lyricism to the experimental. Accompanied by biographical
notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their
own; they are collected now in Twitters
for a Lark.
This collection marks a
continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the
fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here;
the book is also available from Shearsman here )
All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.
