Courts of Air and Earth

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 By the mid-70s he had largely withdrawn from the Press to develop his own exploratory poetry down less familiar and frequented routes.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.