An Evening with Micheal O'Siadhail
October 17th, 2018
7:00-9:00pm
McCormick Lounge, Coffey Hall
Lake Shore Campus
果冻传媒 Chicago
Click to watch the video of Micheal's reading!
Micheal O鈥橲iadhail is an internationally acclaimed Irish poet whose works include Collected Poems and One Crimson Thread. He is Distinguished Poet in Residence at Union Theological Seminary.
The Five Quintets is both poetry and cultural history. It offers a sustained reflection on modernity鈥攑eople and movements鈥攊n poetic meter. O鈥橲iadhail has a five-part structure, with each quintet devoted to a discipline 鈥攖he arts; economics; politics; science; and philosophy and theology.
Just as Dante, in his Divine Comedy, summed up the Middle Ages on the cusp of modernity, The Five Quintets takes stock of a late modern world on the cusp of the first-ever global century.
Micheal read from The Five Quintets, followed by a Q&A session.
"Toward the end of Irish poet Micheal O鈥橲iadhail鈥檚 new and almost unimaginably ambitious book , we encounter a final, synthesizing vision, one that attempts to accommodate the world鈥攊ts history, its physics, its ontology鈥攊n full. In the last canto of the book鈥檚 last section, the speaker spends time in paradise in 鈥渢he company of saints.鈥� (Like I said, it鈥檚 ambitious.) More specifically, the speaker is introduced to, and overhears the conversation of, five figures from philosophical and theological history: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hannah Arendt, Said Nurs卯, Pope John XXIII, and Jean Vanier (the only one of the group who is still alive)."
Extract from the Commonweal article:
, by Anthony Domestico