“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,” W. H. Auden wrote in his elegy to W.B. Yeats. Many of the best poets of the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries have been Irish. The “madness” of religion and politics, as well as a rich tradition of talk and song, inspired these generations of writers. We’ll read poems by Yeats, Heaney, Eaven Boland, Michael Longley, Patrick Kavanaugh, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, and Medbh McGuckian, among others.

Don Barkin has taught a number of poetry courses for OLLI at BCC. He has degrees from Harvard College and Cambridge University. He has taught seminars for a number of years at Yale and Wesleyan. The author of four published books of poetry, he has also been a newspaper reporter and schoolteacher.  

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