Ennis & Music

John Ennis’s poetry shows a fascination with music, musicians and composers of music:

“Orpheus”: a 48-page poem is a Listowel first prize-winner and “the most amazing long poem any Irish poet has written since Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger” (Robert Hogan, Dictionary of Irish Literature).  “Monumental”, David Marcus, New Irish Writing.

“Listening to Mahler’s Resurrection”, a poem written on the death of Ennis’s father: its five movements, with sub-sections, reflect the structure of the original symphony.

“Fair City” / “Pale Venus” long award-winning poem based on Ireland’s most famous ballad, “Molly Malone”: “this work with its bold rhymes, half-rhymes and marvellously controlled consonantal music is a tour de force”, Terence Brown TCD.

Poems written also on classical composers such as O’Carolan, Tchaikovsky,  Górecki, Messiaen and Shostakovich, as well as in response to popular performers such as Seamus Ennis, – the author’s own great-granduncles were uilleann pipers -, the many forgotten pre-Famine performers who played the móinín in the home place, locals like Agnes McKeown and Pat Faulkner who played the all night welcome home post-wedding session at his uncle’s up the road, family out of Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, a female teenager who sang Padraic Column’s “She Moved Through the Fair” in a noisy bar in Mullingar, Cui Jian, John Denver, Joe Dolan, Sìgur Rós, Sulic and Hauser,Pussy Riot, Cree Drummers, Ashley Tubridy, Dalton Rapattoni, Owen Mac and Jim Morrisson: “Devotees Gathering round Jim Morrisson’s Grave” is reprinted in The Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry 2010…

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