Introduction

The essential feature of a city is that people live, work and move through its streets, parks and buildings, interacting with it and at once defining and being defined by the locale they inhabit. The city exists as a place in which the actions and awareness of its inhabitants are endlessly played out. This short talk will consider some of the ways in which poems in the If Ever You Go anthology visualise and present people in the city environment of Dublin. The poems included cover a broad historical range, from Samuel Ferguson to Paula Meehan, revealing the important representation of Dublin people in these texts.

Peter Denman

Peter Denman is a former member of the Department of English at NUI Maynooth. He is the author of Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achievement (1990) and editor of Poems that Matter, a special issue of the Irish University Review (Spring 2009). He has published and broadcast widely on poetry, and has lectured and taught in Ireland and abroad.