Yeats Winter School

The Yeats Winter School is designed as an interlude that allows the visitor the opportunity to learn more about W. B.Yeats and his family against the backdrop of the places—from Benbulben to Knocknarea—which inspired them. The aim of the weekend is to provide a basis for reading, exploring and thinking about Yeats’s poetry and his brother’s work, in the place where much of it began.
 
Margaret Mills Harper is Glucksman Professor of Contemporary Writing in English at the University of Limerick. She specializes in Irish literature, literary modernisms, and poetry of the long twentieth century. She is the author of numerous articles as well as two books, 'Wisdom of Two'', on the occult collaboration between W. B. Yeats and his wife George Hyde Lees, and 'The Aristocracy of Art', about the autobiographical fictions of James Joyce and Thomas Wolfe. She is a co-editor of 'Yeats’s “Vision” Papers', the automatic script that Yeats produced with his wife George just after they married in 1917. With Catherine Paul of Clemson University, she has produced a scholarly edition of Yeats's occult philosophical book 'A Vision' (1925) and is now preparing an edition of the very different 1937 version of 'A Vision'.
 
 
Moya Cannon was born in Co. Donegal. Many of her poems reflect preoccupations with archaeology, with music, with language itself and with the history of migration - the migration of birds, of humans, of human culture. A winner of the Brendan Behan Award and the Lawrence O Shaughnessy Award, her most recent collection is ‘Hands’ (Carcanet Press, Manchester, November 2011). She has three previous collections, ‘Carrying the Songs’ (New and selected poems, Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2007), ‘The Parchment Boat’ and ‘Oar’ both from Gallery Press, Ireland. A limited edition art book,'Winter Birds', was published by Traffic Street Press, (2005), in association with the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota. A selection of her poems has been published by Wake Forest Press in The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, Vol 2 (2010). She has held numerous residencies and, in 1995, was editor of Poetry Ireland Review. She has been 2011 Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Villanova.
 
What better way could you find to spoil yourself than to choose to come away to the Sligo Park Hotel and the beautiful Sligo countryside?
 
The hotel is set on lush landscaped quiet parkland and surrounded by some of the most scenic countryside in Ireland, ranging from the majestic Ben Bulben to the gentle waters of Lough Gill.
 
The Saturday tour explores the best of the Yeats Country, stopping to view the places that caught the imagination of the youthful W. B. Yeats and his brother the painter Jack B. Yeats.
 
As Michael Yeats has written, “To my father, Sligo was home, and Sligo was his initial literary inspiration”!
 
TARIFF
·         Full programme with two nights’ Bed and Breakfast; Dinner one night
·         Full use of the Health and Leisure Club,
from €165 per person sharing.
·         Single room supplement €10.00 per night
·         Avail of a complimentary third night’s B and B as a special bonus!
 
OPTIONAL SUPPLEMENTS
·         Single Room— €10 per night
·         For further information and reservations contact:
GERALDINE OR MARGARET Phone: 071 9190400 Fax: 071 9169556
email: sligo@leehotels.com  /  www.leehotels.com