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Brian Coffey (8 June 1905 – 14 April 1995)[1] was an Irish poet and publisher. His work was informed by hisCatholicism, his background in science and philosophy, and his connection to Frenchsurrealism. He was close to an intellectual European Catholic tradition and mainstream IrishCatholic culture. Two of his long poems,Advent (1975) andDeath of Hektor (1979), were widely considered to be important works in the canon of Irish poeticmodernism. He also ran Advent Books, asmall press, during the 1960s and 1970s.
Coffey was born inDublin in the suburb ofDún Laoghaire.[2] He attended the Mount St Benedict boarding school inGorey,County Wexford from 1917 to 1919 and thenJames Joyce's old school,Clongowes Wood College, inClane,County Kildare, from 1919 until 1922. In 1923, he went to France to study for aBachelor's degree in Classical Studies at the Institution St Vincent,Senlis, Oise.
His father,Denis J. Coffey, was a professor ofanatomy at the Catholic University of Ireland Medical School in Cecilia Street, who served as the first president following the creation of theNational University of Ireland ofUniversity College Dublin (UCD) from 1908 to 1940. Coffey entered UCD in 1924 and earned advanced degrees inmathematics,physics andchemistry. He also represented the college in boxing tournaments.
While still at college, Coffey began writing poetry. He published his first poems in UCD'sThe National Student under the pseudonym Coeuvre. These poems, which have never been collected, showed the influence of FrenchSymbolism and ofTS Eliot. During this time Coffey metDenis Devlin and together they published a volume entitledPoems in 1930.[3] Coffey and Devlin both also participated in college dramatics, taking roles in French plays.
In the early 1930s, Coffey moved to Paris, where he studiedPhysical Chemistry underJean Baptiste Perrin, who had won theNobel Prize for Physics in 1926. He completed these studies in 1933, and hisThree Poems was printed in Paris byJeanette Monnier that same year, as was the poem cardYuki Hira, which was admired byGeorge William Russell andWilliam Butler Yeats. He also became friendly with other Irish writers based in the city, includingThomas MacGreevy andSamuel Beckett. In his 1934 essayRecent Irish Poetry, Beckett picked out Coffey and Devlin as forming 'the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland'.
He entered theInstitut Catholique de Paris that year to work with the noted French philosopherJacques Maritain, taking his licentiate examination in 1936. He then moved to London for a time and contributed reviews and a poem to Eliot'sCriterion magazine. On trips home to Dublin, he contributed to programmes on literary topics onRTÉ radio and published poems inIreland Today.
He returned to Paris in 1937 as an exchange student to work on his doctoral thesis on the idea of order in the work ofThomas Aquinas. In 1938, Coffey's second volume of poetry,Third Person, was published byGeorge Reavey'sEuropa Press. He also contributed translations to the same publisher'sThorns of Thunder (1936), the first collection ofPaul Éluard's work published in English. The poems of this period saw Coffey shake off his earlier influences and begin to find his own voice but, for a variety of reasons,Third Person was to be his last poetry publication for a quarter of a century.
During the war, Coffey taught in schools inLondon andYorkshire, leaving his young family in Dublin. After the war, he returned to Paris and completed his doctoral thesis. The family then moved so Coffey could take up a teaching post at theJesuitSaint Louis University. During this period, Coffey seems to have done very little, if any, creative writing as he focused mainly on philosophical work based on his thesis, publishing a number of essays inThe Modern Schoolman.
By the early 1950s, Coffey had become uncomfortable for a number of reasons, including the nature of his work, his distance from Ireland and the pressures that inevitably came to bear on an academic who had previously associated with well-known left-wing writers in Paris. For these reasons, he began to look for a suitable opportunity to leave the United States and resigned, possibly on a matter of academic principle, in 1952.
In 1952, Coffey returned to live in London and, from 1973,Southampton. He began again to publish his poetry and translations, mainly ofFrench poetry. The first work in English to appear after this period of silence wasMissouri Sequence, apparently begun in St. Louis but first appearing in theUniversity Review in 1962. This poem deals with the experience of exile, memories of the poet's dead parents and the premature birth of a child. It is written in a much more conventional syntax than most of Coffey's work and, thanks to this greater accessibility, is one of his most widely read works.
Over the next decade or so, he published regularly in theUniversity Review (later known as theIrish University Review), a relationship that culminated in the 1975 special issue. This featured an introduction by DrJCC Mays, a selection of translations from French, the satireLeo andAdvent, a meditation on death inspired by the death of the poet's son in a motorcycle accident. The poem is in seven sections, based, according to Coffey, in an interview withParkman Howe on thecanonical hours of theCatholic Church.
Another key work of this period wasDeath of Hektor, which uses the myth ofTroy as a framework for a meditation on war and its victims. The trade editions ofAdvent andDeath of Hektor were both published by theMenard Press. He also edited Devlin'sCollected Poems (1964), first for aUniversity Review Devlin special issue and later as a book fromDolmen Press.
He also set up his own publishing enterprise, Advent Books, which published work by himself and by younger writers he wanted to support. He learned printmaking and produced a good deal of original work, including an interesting set of images based on the plays of his old friend Beckett. His interest in visual art also led to some experiments inconcrete poetry, most notably his 1966 Advent bookMonster: A Concrete Poem. His work was championed by a number of younger Irish poets, especiallyMichael Smith andTrevor Joyce. These two published poetry, prose and translations by Coffey in their journalThe Lace Curtain, and hisSelected Poems (1971), under theirNew Writers Press imprint.[4] This book was instrumental in helping establish his reputation as a leading Irish exponent ofmodernist poetry.
The appearance in 1991 of a major selectionPoems and Versions 1929–1990 and his translationsPoems from Mallarmé helped confirm his status as one of the leading Irish modernists. He died at the age of 89 and was buried in Southampton, England.
Poetry
Philosophy and criticism
As editor
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