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Maurice Scully is an Irish poet who has published over a dozen volumes of work, a selection of which may be found in Doing the Same in English (Dedalus Press, 2008) and A Tour of the Lattice (Veer Books, 2011). For a list of major publications, please click here.
Born in Ireland in 1952, Scully lived and travelled in Ireland, Italy, and Africa before returning to live with his family in Dublin. For a more detailed biography, please click here.
He is a member of Aosdána.
What the critics say:
‘The sheer concreteness of [Scully’s] writing mirrors the desire to present what is, with minimal interference from the vanity of the writing ego. The world is not presented as a stage set for the acting out of some human drama but as a complex system of which the human domain is just a part … this is a poetry of learning to live with and in the world, not explaining and improving on it.’ — Billy Mills, Sustainable Poetry
‘A light for the language indeed.’ — Harry Gilonis, The Gig
‘While the reputed strangeness in Scully’s work is rooted in the ordinary obvious, the flowers it produces are truly exotic.’ — Augustus Young, Golden Handcuffs Review
‘While poets like William Carlos Williams once announced that anything was available for the subject of the poem, Scully turns the paradigm on its head. The poem becomes less about subject matter, or what the poem is “about”, and more an occasion or experience in itself …. It is a poetry that is playful, irreverent, skittish, rhapsodic and paratactic all at the same time.’ — Paul Perry, The Stinging Fly
‘For me, Scully is one of the very best Irish poets alive today.’ — Mike Begnal, Fortnight
‘[Scully’s] innovations … take a modernist inheritance, strip it of any residual mythos, and use it to examine the interaction of the writer’s reflecting mind with the daily life of everybody … and truly, if one seeks a poetry of the moment that records and wryly critiques the inequities of modern life, Maurice Scully’s is it.’ — Marthine Satris
‘[Scully’s Things That Happen] is the most ambitious and important long poem in modern Irish literature.’ — Eric Falci
Maurice Scully 