LIMERICK Writers’ Centre’s annual celebration of the poet and writer Robert Graves (1895–1985), takes place this Friday July 24 at 6pm in the Locke Bar on George’s Quay. His works, and tribute songs to his remarkable lyricism and perspective by Natalie Merchant and Jay Ansill, will mark the occasion.
Last year the Centre unveiled a commemorative plaque to the poet and author who wrote some 140 books of poetry, fiction, biography, criticism, anthropology, social history, mythology, biblical studies, translation. There were even children’s books.
Interestingly, Robert Graves’ family origins lie here in Limerick, a distinguished line of creatives and church men.
Members of the Barrington Street hub for writers hope to make his plaque one of a collective of a dozen that over time, will provide another magnet to the city as literary trail.
Robert Graves actually frequented The Locke Bar while stationed in Limerick during the period 1919-1921, serving as an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. He was friends with war poet Siegfried Sassoon who was stationed in Limerick during the War of Independence.
Thanks to research provided by Dominic Taylor of the Writers’ Centre, we can tell you that Graves, who was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 1975, yielded this tribute from Michael Longley:
“Not many poets can produce such commanding, resonant, unforgettable opening lines…Yet his line is flexible, at times improvisatory, jazzy even…The metre seems to dissolve in ‘blue’ notes, the syntax tantalisingly to unravel.”
And from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Queens, Belfast:
“Robert Graves’s profound influence on the generation of Irish poets who began writing in the 1950s and 1960s is matched by his own indebtedness to Irish literature and Celtic scholarship earlier in the 20th century.”
The paternal grandfather of Robert Graves was bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe from 1866 to 1899 and he is buried in the grounds of St. Mary’s Cathedral across the road from George’s Quay. He was a leading scholar on the Ogham script.
Graves himself is the son of Alfred Perceval Graves, author of Father O’Flynn, and a poet and Gaelic scholar who played an important part in the revival of Irish literature.
