Europe Day event at Inishbofin Library on Saturday,8thMay

To celebrate Europe Day and as part of the Inishbofin Arts Festival, John Liddy, an Irish poet who has lived in Madrid for many years, will read from the work of Spanish poet, Miguel Hernandez in Inishbofin Library at 5.00pm on Saturday 8^th May.

Liddy writes poems of recollection, spirituality, politics and nature. He writes of the earth in all its literal and poetic conceptions – childhood, the house, the land, tradition and family. His work has that inexorable sense of time, time which changes and destroys and creates.
It is appropriate that John’s reading in Inishbofin will mark the centenary of the birth of the Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez. The poet Edward Hirsch has described Hernandez as “one of the most open-hearted and heart-breaking Spanish-language poets in the 20th century. His emotionally charged poetry is filled with human difficulties, so full of the earth and the spirit of freedom."
As a poet who has lived in Madrid since 1982, where he works as a librarian and teacher at the British Institute, a poet now as profoundly Irish as he is Spanish, a man who draws from the deep sources of tradition and history, a poet who should be read as an importer of new directions, it is fitting that at his Inishbofin reading that he will honour the memory of the great Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez.
Miguel Hernández, a goatherd born in 1910 in a village in eastern Spain, received limited formal education. He spent the last three years of his tragic life in Franco's prisons, where he died on March 28, 1942, before he was 32 years old.