Christodoulos Makris

My poem 'New Year's Eve', from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue , was broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 on Thursday 29 December, during the mid-morning show Today with Pat Kenny. It was part of a 25-minute section of poems and prose extracts on the themes of winter, Christmas and the New Year, compiled and presented by Niall McMonagle. A podcast of this section of the show is available on the RTÉ website (the introduction to my poem, read by actor Barry Barnes, starts at around 14:45).

Harry Clifton 's highly appreciative review of Spitting Out the Mother Tongue appeared in last Saturday's edition of The Irish Times . A couple of extracts: "The world it inhabits has gone past the point of the national, and begun to relax into its own ubiquity as a fact of life, without the usual anguish of expatriation." "... he and his poems, so universally at home in themselves, are a straw in the wind, a forerunner, in Irish poetry and Irish poetry publishing, of what has happened in Britain with Grace Nichols, Benjamin Zephaniah, Jackie Kay." Read the full review here .

The resulting text from my shack intervention at the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda last Saturday - part of Thomas Brezing's exhibition 'The Art of Failure isn't hard to Master' - is now on the gallery website . Many thanks and congratulations to all who collaborated in composing this piece. Thanks also to the gallery staff. I enjoyed shacking up with myself for a few hours and interacting with the public from there. Footage of my reading of the text after emerging from the shack has surfaced on YouTube:

Occupy Writers have published my reverse-narrative poem 'Mayday' . Read more Occupied Writings, and see the full list of writers who have signed their support to the Occupy Movement around the world, on the Occupy Writers website - with links to other support groups, news and information on how to find your local Occupy group.

The Irish Centre for Poetry Studies at the Mater Dei Institute in Dublin has published the third issue of its online journal POST . Edited by Michael Hinds, POST III: Poetry at the Games is devoted to links between poetry and sports or games, and as such it includes among others a survey of poetry inspired by chess, a (largely) pictorial essay on the poetics of horse racing, a study of sport in the work of Brendan Kennelly, and an examination of the appearance of the word 'bikini' in Ezra Pound's Cantos . POST is subtitled a review of poetry studies , and is therefore of an academic/scholarly nature. But in addition to essays and reviews it often features original poetry: derek beaulieu's visual poem-games appear throughout this issue, while my sequence 'Masculine Biography Vol 1' (from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue ) is also included, introduced in the editorial as "describing a personal history in World Cup-termed fragments".

Volume 7 (Fall 2011) of Cadences: A Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus has just been published. This issue places particular emphasis on translation and its bridge-building aspect, with an essay by EU official and literary translator Anthi Karra prominent. And apart from the usual content of poetry, fiction and non-fiction texts in Greek, Turkish and English - often translated from one into another of these three main languages of the island - there are translations from the Portuguese, Spanish, Lithuanian and Polish. The issue also includes my poems 'The Orchard' and ' Το Πίσω Περβόλι ' from Spitting Out the Mother Tongue , which were written simultaneously as two versions or branches of the same poem, one in English and the other in the Cypriot dialect of Greek.