Visions At Templeglantine

By John W. Sexton

Reprising the Aisling tradition through personal vision, dream, memory and historical re-imagining, John W. Sexton’s Visions at Templeglantine presents the concept of the Celtic Triple Muse Goddess as a means to express a contemporary poetic.
More excitingly than any other poet presently writing in Ireland, Sexton thinks the world anew. His poems offer a unique, provocative adventure through a landscape surreal as a dream, lyrical and terrifying as a fairytale. Yet for all its absorbing forays into the visionary, his work remains anchored by a profound and often painful wisdom. Breathing the exotic into plainness, Sexton pushes back the flawed boundaries of ordinary life. He satisfies our desire for a world porous with imagination, potent with subconscious symbology readable on the surface of the quotidian like Braille.
- Grace Wells, Contrary Magazine
Charles Simic said, "All poets, if they are any good, tend to stand apart from their literary age. They either linger in the past, advance into some imaginary future, or live in some version of the present that is altogether of their own." What is remarkable about Sexton is that he does all three.
- Adam Wyeth, Southword

• Language: English
• Publisher: Limerick Writers Centre
• Release date: Jun 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781370197583

John W. Sexton

John W. Sexton was born in 1958 and is the author of six previous poetry collections: The Prince’s Brief Career, Foreword by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, (Cairn Mountain Press, 1995), Shadows Bloom / Scáthanna Faoi Bhláth, a book of haiku with translations into Irish by Gabriel Rosenstock (Doghouse, 2004), Vortex (Doghouse, 2005), Petit Mal (Revival Press 2009), The Offspring of the Moon (Salmon Poetry 2013) and Futures Pass (Salmon Poetry 2018). A chapbook of his surrealist poetry, Inverted Night, came out from SurVision in April 2019.He also created and wrote The Ivory Tower for RTE radio, which ran to over one hundred half-hour episodes. His novels based on this series, The Johnny Coffin Diaries and Johnny Coffin School-Dazed are both published by The O’Brien Press and have been translated into Italian and Serbian.Under the ironic pseudonym of Sex W. Johnston he has recorded an album with legendary Stranglers frontman, Hugh Cornwell, entitled Sons of Shiva, which has been released on Track Records.He is a past nominee for The Hennessy Literary Award and his poem The Green Owl was awarded the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007 for best single poem. His poem In and Out of Their Heads, from The Offspring of the Moon, was selected for The Forward Book of Poetry 2014. His poem The Snails was shortlisted for the 2018 An Post / Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year Award. In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.

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