Advent

by Brian Coffey

Poetry. The fifth publication of ADVENT, 40 years after Brian Coffey circulated a foolscap Advent Books edition of 25 to family and friends in 1974. Long out of print and in danger of neglect, an extraordinary, certainly mysterious, long poem. Two decades in gestation and composition, the spatial complexities of the poetry have been resolved for this very large scale edition. On one level a poem about a mother's morning for her son killed in a motorbike accident, it is an 8 section poem based on the canonical hours of the Catholic church. Coffey's poetry was described by Samuel Beckett as constituting the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland.

40 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

There are multiple people who have published under the name Brian Coffey. This profile is for the Irish poet. For the books Dean Koontz published as Brian Coffey, please go here.

Brian Coffey was an Irish poet and publisher.

Poetry

Poems (1930), (with Denis Devlin)
Three Poems (1933)
Third Person (1938)
Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance (1965). (trans. of Mallarmé's Coup de Dés)
Monster: A Concrete Poem (1966)
Selected Poems (1971),
Advent in Irish University Review, Vol. 5., No. 1 (Spring 1975)
The Big Laugh (1976)
Death of Hektor (1979), ill. S.W. Hayter
Topos and Other Poems (Bath: Mammon Press 1981)
Death of Hektor: Poem (1982)
Advent (1986)
Chanterelles: Short Poems 1971-83 (1985)
Poems and Versions 1929-1990, pref. by J. C. C. Mays (1991),
Poems from Mallarmé (1991)

Philosophy & Criticism

‘The Philosophy of Science and the Scientific Attitude: I’, in The Modern Schoolman, 36 (1948), pp.23-35
‘The Notion of Order According to St. Thomas Aquinas’, in The Modern Schoolman, 28, 1 (1949), pp.1-18
‘Notes on Modern Cosmological Speculation’, in The Modern Schoolman, 29, 3 (1952), pp.183-96
‘Memory's Murphy Maker’, in Threshold vol. 17 (1962), p.33 [on Beckett]
‘Of Denis Devlin: Vestiges, Sentences, Presages’, in Irish University Review 2, 10 (1965), pp.3-18
‘A Note on Rat Island’, in Irish University Review, Vol. 3. no. 8 (1966), pp.25-8 *‘Denis Devlin: Poet of Distance’, in Andrew Carpenter, ed., Place, Personality and the Irish Writer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1977), 137-57
‘Extracts from "Concerning Making"’, in The Lace Curtain, 6 (Autumnn 1978), pp.31-7
"About Poetry", Dedalus Irish Poets: An Anthology [ed. J. F. Deane] (Dublin: Dedalus Press 1992) [c.p.253-54].