Description

This new collection covers poems by Rudi Holzapfel from his earliest published attempt at Trinity College, Dublin, when he was just 21, through his years in Leeds and Bonn, and finally the years of his Tipperary sonnets to his death in 2006. Although a previous collection called Ask Silence Why came out years ago, it is now out of print. Other collections are increasingly difficult to obtain, although several poems have been anthologised. His best poetry is worthy of comparison to the best worst of Heaney, Muldoon, Montague, Kennelly, Mahon and McDara Wood. Holzapfel had a special interest in Clarence Mangan and the Irish bardic tradition and this is reflected in his work. His M.Lit dissertation on Irish periodicals was published (a rare distinction) in 1964 and his poetry was acclaimed from the early 1960s onward. Yet as a young man in the Dublin of the Sixties, Rudi Holzapfel was for a while the best known of the rising generation of younger poets - the post-Ginger Man student poets who had read Lorca and e.e. cummings, and the Beats, and sat at the feet of Patrick Kavanagh and other Dublin heroes. The years of tragic neglect came later. His peripatetic life, wide interests and personal magnetism have been described in memoirs of the period as has his maverick status in Ireland's literary life.