The Writers of Wales Database

CLANCY, JOSEPH P

27 Llys Hen Ysgol, North Road, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 2ER
Tel: (01970) 617945

Poet and translator. Born on the 8 March 1928 in New York City, Joseph Clancy holds his PhD from Fordham University, and is Marymount Manhattan College’s Emeritus Professor of English Literature.

It was coming across the late Gwyn Williams’ Introduction to Welsh Poetry in his college library that aroused Clancy’s interest in Dafydd ap Gwilym and his contemporaries, and he has subsequently translated extensively from modern as well as medieval Welsh literature. Translating Welsh poetry, he notes, has had a considerable influence on his own poems, in both substance and style.

Joseph Clancy is Fellow of the English Language Section of Yr Academi Gymreig, and an Honorary Fellow of Aberystwyth University, He was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University of Wales for his work as poet and translator.

Reviews:
With respect to Medieval Welsh Poems (Four Courts Press, 2002):

"…It is wonderful to have a large corpus of this astonishingly diverse poetry, much of which speaks so eloquently to the modern age…"
Bernard O’Donaghue, TLS

"…This book contains more than 150 poems, a lucid introduction and a useful glossary. It is to be treasured as the work of a master translator, a poet in his own right, who - by dint of hard work and flashes of inspiration - has rendered Wales a huge favour by making its poetry accessible to the English-reading world…"
Meic Stephens

With respect to Ordinary Time (Gomer, 1999):

"...This powerful and clear sighted collection offers the reader, through a variety of perspectives and voices, insight into time, its passing and the invaluable response of this writer..."
Petra Newman 


Selected Publications:

Poetry
The Significance of Flesh: Poems 1950-1983 (Gomer, 1984)
Here & There (Headland, 1994)
Ordinary Time (Gomer, 1999)
Passing Through (Headland, 2008)

Translations:
The Odes and Epodes of Horace (University of Chicago Press, 1960)
Medieval Welsh Lyrics (Macmillan, 1965)
The Earliest Welsh Poetry (Macmillan, 1970) 
Twentieth Century Welsh Poems (Gomer, 1982)
Living a Life: Selected Poems by Gwyn Thomas (Bridges Books, 1982)
The Plays of Saunders Lewis (Christopher Davies, 1985)
Bobi Jones: Selected Poems (Christopher Davies, 1987)
The World of Kate Roberts (Temple University Press, 1991)
Saunders Lewis: Selected Poems (University of Wales Press, 1993)
Where There’s Love: Welsh Folk Poems of Love and Marriage (Northgate Books, 1995)
The Light in the Gloom: Poems and Prose by Alun Llywellyn Williams (Gwasg Gee, 1998)
Medieval Welsh Poems (Four Courts Press, 2002)

Non-Fiction
Pendragon: King Arthur and His Britain (Macmillan, 1971)
Other Words: Essays on Poetry and Translation (University of Wales Press, 1999)

Short Stories (as P.G. Thomas)
The Retired Life (Northgate Books, 1997)

Novel (with Gertrude Clancy)
Death is a Pilgrim: A Canterbury Tale (Northgate Books, 1993)

Contributed to:
The Oxford Book of Welsh Verse in English (contributor) (Oxford University Press, 1977)
The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh poetry (contributor) (Bloodaxe, 2003)
Poetry 1900-2000 (contributor) (Library of Wales, Parthian, 2008)
Other Land (contributor) (Parthian, 2008)





Passing Through (Headland, 2008)

Published to mark the author’s 80th birthday, Passing Through is a generous gathering of Joseph Clancy’ s poems of the last decade, wide-ranging in subject and style.

’California Suite’ opens the collection by viewing diverse aspects of that state through a first-time visitor’s ’east coast and expatriate eyes’. It is followed by a number of ’Museum Pieces’, including poems on painters (’Hopper’s Light’, ’Looking at Rembrandt’, ’Looking for Vermeer’) and on a Celtic cross, live butterflies in a science museum, Welsh funeral socks and Japanese Screens. A group of ’Portraits’ depicts, among others, a 19th century palaeontologist and Edith Stein, the Jewish philosopher and Carmelite nun killed at Auschwitz.

’A Matter of Time’, the concluding section, is the largest and the most varied. There are poems on a comet’s appearance at Easter, on two contrasting American towns and on the Welsh estate of Gregynog, ’Dreamings’ that give voice to the otherness of such creatures as hare, dragonfly, light verse in ’Levities’ and short poems in ’Brevities’, celebrations of the births of grandchildren and of marital love in old age. Throughout these poems, as in the volume as a whole, the recurrent theme of transiency and mortality is grounded quietly, often joyfully, in the possibility of Christian faith.