Billy Ramsell
(Ireland, 1977)
Billy Ramsell was born in 1977 in Cork, where he was educated in the North Monastery and at University College, Cork. His debut collection Complicated Pleasures was nominated for an Eithne Strong Award in 2008 and he has also been shortlisted for the Hennessy Award. Ramsell has declared, “[In my work] I try to avoid the following: my family, my childhood, a certain type of rural idyll, a certain way of writing about history, poems that explicitly concern themselves with Ireland and Irishness, local characters.”
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Ramsell is of a younger generation which finds many of the established themes of Irish poetry thoroughly exhausted. Technically, Ramsell’s long loose lines would be a comfortable fit with contemporary American mainstream poetic practice. In the Irish tradition, where ideas of what can constitute a technically good poem have been shaped by a hegemony of conservative academics for decades, Ramsell’s forms are an affront to the decorum of a poetic old order.
Yet no matter how hard Ramsell may intend to stray from overt expressions of Irishness, a sense of Irish place often asserts itself in his work, organically, unforced. Encounters with nature in Ramsell’s work such as in ‘An Otter’ are more likely to happen on an urban quayside than in the rural ditch or bog of tradition. The increased urbanisation of Ireland and the peculiar alienation that goes with it (rural life, especially in a depopulated countryside, produces an already well-documented form of alienation) is reflected in its new literature; it is an alienation often accompanied by material wealth and a poverty of the spirit as in Ramsell’s poem ‘Gated Community’.
Ramsell has spent long periods abroad, particularly in Iberia, but he continues to use his home city as a base to live in and work from.
Yet no matter how hard Ramsell may intend to stray from overt expressions of Irishness, a sense of Irish place often asserts itself in his work, organically, unforced. Encounters with nature in Ramsell’s work such as in ‘An Otter’ are more likely to happen on an urban quayside than in the rural ditch or bog of tradition. The increased urbanisation of Ireland and the peculiar alienation that goes with it (rural life, especially in a depopulated countryside, produces an already well-documented form of alienation) is reflected in its new literature; it is an alienation often accompanied by material wealth and a poverty of the spirit as in Ramsell’s poem ‘Gated Community’.
Ramsell has spent long periods abroad, particularly in Iberia, but he continues to use his home city as a base to live in and work from.
Last updated: Dec 4, 2008
© Image: Billy Ramsell 2008
Bibliography
Complicated Pleasures, Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2007
Links
Billy Ramsell's page, with links, on the Munster Literature Centre website
Dedalus Press page
'Breath', another poem
Complicated Pleasures, Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2007
Links
Billy Ramsell's page, with links, on the Munster Literature Centre website
Dedalus Press page
'Breath', another poem
