Ulster Poet Robert Greacen dies aged 87

15/04/2008
 

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland has learned with great regret of the death of the POET ROBERT GREACEN in Dublin on Sunday 13th April at the age of 87. His last book Robert Greacen: New and Selected Poems (Salmon) was published in 2006.

Though he grew up on the Stranmillis Road in Belfast and spent much of his childhood in Co Monaghan, Greacen was born in Derry on 24th October 1920.

A stranger among strangers
I look for my house of birth.
Pulled down years ago.
I show the paper: ‘I certify …’
Ich bin ein Derryman
(from ‘Homecomings’)

He was educated at Methodist College, Belfast and later studied at Trinity College, Dublin. As a student he began to publish his poems and essays and developed a left-wing sensibility which he retained throughout his life.

For many years he lived in London working in both journalism and in adult education. Among his collections of poetry are The Bird (1941), One Recent Evening (1944) and The Undying Day (1948). With Valentin Iremonger he edited the Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1949) and wrote studies of C P Snow (1952) and Noel Coward (1953). In 1975, he returned to poetry with A Garland For Captain Fox (Gallery), in which the enigmatic eponymous hero – a dashing alter-ego for the quiet and unassuming writer – wittily undercuts and exposes the platitudes and lazy corruption of modern life. Other collections followed, most notably Young Mr Gibbon (1979), A Bright Mask (1985) and Protestant Without A Horse (1997).

Even Without Irene (Dolmen, 1969) was an autobiographical memoir reissued by Lagan Press in Belfast in 1995, as a new generation of Ulster writers discovered the laconic, wry and urbane Greacen and sought in his biography a source for the extraordinarily contemporary voice found in his Collected Poems 1944-1994 (Lagan Press), a volume which won the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry in 1995. An expanded version of the memoir was published as The Sash My Father Wore in 1997.

In later years he moved to Dublin. "We will miss the urbane, courteous intelligence that formed the basis of Robert's quiet toned, always engaging poetry", Prof Terence Brown, of Trinity College Dublin said.

A member of Aosdána, an exclusive gathering of fewer than 250 artists who have made an impact in the arts in Ireland, Greacen was one of a remarkable generation which marked a revival of literature from and in Northern Ireland after the war, a group which included Michael McLaverty, Sam Hanna Bell, Roy McFadden, John Boyd and Joseph Tomelty, which he recalled in his study Rooted in Ulster: Nine Ulster Lives (2000).

He was married to children’s author Patricia Hutchins and is survived by his daughter Arethusa Greacen. A memorial service will be held in Findlater's Church, Dublin, on Saturday 19th April.

A most civilised man, Captain Fox,
discreet, solid, reliable.

His business isn’t my business.
(from ’Captain Fox’)