COMEDIAN TOMMY Tiernan will be the first of 10 performers reading works by some of Ireland’s greatest poets in Druid’s Coole Park Poetry Series.
The Coole Park Poetry Series, co-produced by Druid Theatre Company and the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, will feature 10 short films with a variety of actors reading. The poems have been curated by Colm Tóibín, and arranged in order of the poets’ birth dates.
The series opens this Wednesday, May 19, with Tommy Tiernan reading Austin Clarke’s ‘The Echo at Coole’.
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Rory Nolan Andrew Bennett. Photo:- Matthew Thompson
The films were shot by Matthew Thompson on location at Coole Park in south Galway, the home of Lady Gregory. They will premiere each Wednesday on the YouTube channels of Druid and the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. They will be free to view.
The line-up for the remaining films will be Aaron Monaghan reading ‘The Hospital’ by Patrick Kavanagh (May 26 ); Seán McGinley reading ‘Another September’ by Thomas Kinsella (June 2 ); Marty Rea reading an excerpt from ‘Station Island’ by Seamus Heaney (June 9 ); Brian Doherty reading ‘A Disused Shed in County Wexford’ by Derek Mahon (June 16 ); Venetia Bowe reading ‘The Architectural Metaphor’ by Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin (June 23 ); Jade Jordan reading ‘The Lost Art of Letter Writing’ by Eavan Boland (June 30 ); Andrew Bennett and Rory Nolan reading ‘Tullynoe: Tête-à-Tête in the Parish’s Priest’s Parlour’ by Paul Durcan (July 7 ); and Marie Mullen reading ‘Cathleen’ by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (July 14 ).
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Jade Jordan. Photo:- Matthew Thompson
Colm Tóibín said he chose the poems for this series because “I love them and want to share them”.
“I also wanted to see them in a new context,” he said. “Part of this context is Druid, but part of it is also Coole Park, the house and estate where Lady Gregory, as a writer and a translator, began to re-envision Ireland, creating imaginative space for the writers of her own time, and for the writers who came after.”
“At her home in Coole Park, Lady Gregory hosted a generation of great Irish poets whose words still echo through the trees,” said Druid artistic director, Garry Hynes. “It’s an honour to create these new poetry films in such an inspiring place.”
