With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the Cold

Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1947, Trevor Joyce was brought up between Mary Street, in the city centre, and the Galway Gaeltacht. Aged nineteen, he co-founded New Writers' Press in Dublin with Michael Smith, and his first book was NWP's initial publication in 1967. Joyce was also a founding editor of NWP's influential journal, The Lace Curtain. By the mid-70s he had largely withdrawn from the Press to develop his own exploratory poetry down less familiar and frequented routes. In Dublin and Oxford, in the early eighties, he conducted seminars and lectured on classical Chinese poetry, and visited the People's Republic of China as a poet at the invitation of the Chinese government in 1983. Having read Philosophy and English at University College Dublin, he moved to Cork where he read Mathematical Sciences in University College Cork. He worked for twelve years as a Business Systems Analyst with Apple Computer at their European manufacturing facility in Cork, but since January 2000 has been a full-time writer. Joyce's poems have appeared in many journals, and he has published eleven volumes of poetry, including The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine (1976), his working of the middle-Irish Buile Suibhne, and stone floods (1995), which was nominated for the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry. All these books have come through small presses, where openness to invention compensates for lack of publicity, wide distribution or commercial promotion. His most recent publications are with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold: A Body of Work 1966 - 2000 (NWP & Shearsman Books, 2001; 2nd edition 2003), a large collection from Toronto publisher The Gig: What's in Store (2007), and a volume of translations, Courts of Air and Earth (Shearsman Books, 2008). He has also published several papers on contemporary poetics, and has lectured and given public readings of his work throughout Ireland, the U.K. and the U.S.A. Awarded a Literary Bursary by the Irish Arts Council (2001), Joyce was a Fulbright Scholar for the year 2002 - 2003. In 2004 he was elected a member of Aosdana, the Irish Affiliation of Artists, and was the first writer to be awarded a fellowship by the Ballinglen Arts Foundation.

"I find myself almost surprised, after having lived with this book for several months, at how difficult I now find it to think of the landscape of contemporary poetry without this body of work. It is a book that deserves to find a wide and diverse readership." Nate Dorward, Chicago Review) "This book collects work since 1966, but about three-quarters of it consists of poems written in the last seven or so years, witness to a quite remarkable flowering of Joyce's talent. The work is consistently interesting, formally engaging, wide-ranging and risky: altogether an unmissable collection." (Peter Sirr, Poetry Ireland Review) "The later poems in With the first dream of fire are extraordinary ... Joyce's inventiveness, restlessness, range - these qualities in operation and not simply packaged in last year's Christmas wrapping - are simply stunning. The title of this review ['with the fire in him now'] is borrowed from Krapp's Last Tape. 'Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back. [Krapp motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence.]' Krapp's closing words test an actor's control at the limits of ability; a prick of compromise deflates pretension entirely. Joyce's writing produces that same white sound again and again, which is the highest praise." (J.C.C. Mays, Dublin Review)