Brindled Cat and the Nightingale's Tongue

Louis de Paor was born in 1961 in Cork, and educated at Coláiste an Spioraid Naoimh. He is one of Ireland's leading Irish-language poets, and was a key figure in the Irish language literary renaissance of the 1980s and 90s, editing the influential Irish-language journal Innti for a time. He spent time as a lecturer in Irish at University College Cork and Thomond College, Limerick, before moving to Australia in 1987, where he worked in local and ethnic radio in Melbourne and taught evening classes in Irish language and literature at Melbourne University and the Melbourne Council for Adult Education. He was Visiting Professor of Celtic Studies at Sydney University in 1993 and Visiting Fellow in 1992. He returned to Ireland in 1996 and worked as proof editor of the Irish language newspaper Foinse before being appointed Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at NUI Galway in 2000. He was Jefferson Smurfit Distinguished Fellow at the University of St Louis-Missouri in 2002 and received the Charles Fanning medal from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 2009. His most recent bilingual editions of his own poetry are Ag greadadh bas sa reilig / Clapping in the cemetery (Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2005), agus rud eile de / and another thing (Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2010), and The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale's Tongue (Bloodaxe Books / Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2014). De Paor has collaborated with the Cork singer John Spillane under the name Gaelic Hit Factory, with uilleann piper Ronan Browne and Brooklyn based composer Dana Lyn. He has also published an anthology of 20th-century poetry in Irish, Coiscéim na haoise seo (1991), co-edited with Seán Ó Tuama; a bilingual edition of the selected poems of Máire Mhac an tSaoi, An paróiste míorúilteach / The miraculous parish (2011); and a critical edition of the selected poems of Liam S. Gógan, Míorúilt an chleite chaoin (2012). His bilingual anthology Leabhar na hAthghabhála / Poems of Repossession was published by Bloodaxe Books with Cló Iar-Chonnacht in 2016, continuing the line of Irish-language poetry where Thomas Kinsella's earlier anthology An Duanaire, 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (1981) left off. The CD accompanying agus rud eile de / and another thing and the enhanced ebook with audio edition of The Brindled Cat and the Nightingale's Tongue both draw on his collaborations with Ronan Browne.

'This is an energetic, even boisterous, body of poetry, enlivened with a gift for the unexpected but compelling metaphor, ever ready to invite the reader to look afresh at the world of the everyday. These are poems that effectively combine emotion and intellect, sensuousness and insight, humour and melancholy. Louis de Paor is a poet who has inherited that peculiar strand of reasonable unreason that has marked much of best modern and contemporary poetry in Irish' - Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith.