Sally Connolly

Sally Connolly (Irish, Saidhbhe Ní Conghalaigh, born in 1976 in St Albans, England) is a writer and academic.

Sally Connolly
Born1976
St Albans, England
NationalityBritish, Irish, American
OccupationAcademic, literary critic
AwardsKennedy Scholarship
Academic background
EducationUniversity College London
Harvard University
Alma materUniversity College London (BA, MA, PhD)
Academic work
DisciplineLiterary Criticism
Sub-disciplinePoetry
InstitutionsUniversity of Houston
Main interestsElegy, Prosody and Meter (poetry), Literary Representations of Disaster, Modernist Epic (literature), New Formalism, Poetic Influence.

Life

She went to St Albans School, Hertfordshire where she studied with the poet John Mole, and attended University College London and, as a Kennedy Scholar, Harvard University.[1] She studied for her doctorate under the supervision of the poet Mark Ford and at Harvard with Helen Vendler and Seamus Heaney. She has published widely on twentieth- and twenty-first century British, Irish and American Poetry and is a latter day practitioner of the school of close, attentive reading espoused by critics such as Christopher Ricks and Vendler.

She is Martha Gano Houstoun Research Professor of English Literature at The University of Houston.[2][3] Her 2016 book Grief and Meter is the first in the field of elegy studies to consider elegies for poets as a significant elegiac subgenre for which she coins the term "genealogical elegies." The noted British critic John Sutherland (author) describes Grief and Meter as "unusually thought provoking" and praises her "refreshingly sharp close readings".[4] Matthew Creasy writes in a review in This Year's Work in English Studies (Oxford) that Grief and Meter is an "eloquent and finely observed study of the elegy for a poet as a genre, a mode and, above all, a form. Her introduction begins with Auden, and Connolly devotes a chapter to reading ‘In Memory of W.B Yeats’ as ‘the touchstone genealogical elegy of the twentieth century and beyond’. Subsequent chapters explore the working out of Auden’s influence in poetry by Joseph Brodsky, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Seamus Heaney. This choice of poets reveals Connolly’s opening image of Auden on the steamship to America in January 1939 as a kind of conceptual pun for her interest in transatlantic poetics. As well as a lively account of elegiac form that draws on well-established work in this area by Peter Sacks, Connolly also offers her deft close readings as a corrective to the ‘distant reading’ of genres and forms offered by Franco Moretti and others."[5]

In relation to her second book Ranches of Isolation, Stephanie Burt writes that Connolly, "has a sharp ear for how poetry sounds, for where it originates and where it ends up, and she’s in a good position to say, not just thanks to her knowledge of things Irish and Irish English and British English and American, but thanks to her knowledge about the guts of poems: past and present, early-career and deeply canonical, out-there and close to the heart, outspoken and close to the vest, get attention in Connolly’s personal, thoughtful, pellucid language. The Anglophone world needs more poetry critics so careful, so thoughtful, so able to speak their minds."[6]

She is currently working on a book about AIDS Poetry.

She is a regular contributor to publications such as the Times Literary Supplement,[7] Poetry (magazine)[8] and The London Evening Standard.[9]

Her brother, Pete Connolly, is a British professional skateboarder who holds the Guinness World Record for speed longboarding. In September 2017 he skated downhill at 91.17 mph.[10]

Selected Works
  • Ranches of Isolation: Transatlantic Poetry (MadHat Press, 2018)[11]
  • "Transatlantic Poetics: An Autobiography", Plume Poetry, 2017[12]
  • "Two Genealogical Elegies for Seamus Heaney", Literary Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2017)
  • Grief and Meter: Elegies for Poets after Auden (University of Virginia Press, 2016)[13]
  • "Breaking Bread With the Dead: W. H. Auden, Seamus Heaney and Yeats's Influence", Yeats Annual 17, Palgrave MacMillan[14][15][16]
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References
  1. "Full List of Kennedy Scholars".
  2. "Dr Sally Connolly".
  3. "Found: Former UH graduate students discover 'forgotten' Anne Sexton poetry". HoustonChronicle.com. 16 October 2018.
  4. "Grief and Meter".
  5. Levay, Matthew; Radford, Andrew; Krzakowski, Caroline; Keese, Andrew; Dick, Maria-daniella; Livingstone, Catriona; Tweed, Hannah; MartÍn, Gustavo A RodrÍGuez; Saunders, Graham; Baker, William; Creasy, Matthew; O’Hanlon, Karl; Hanna, Adam (2018). "XVModern Literature". The Year's Work in English Studies. 97 (1): 889–1030. doi:10.1093/ywes/may015. ISSN 0084-4144.
  6. "Ranches of Isolation by Sally Connolly | MadHat Press". MadHat Press.
  7. "Sally Connolly". TheTLS.
  8. Connolly, Sally (15 November 2018). "Sally Connolly". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 15 November 2018.
  9. "Author Page: London Evening Standard".
  10. "Pete Connolly World Record".
  11. Connolly, Sally (2018-10-15). Ranches of Isolation: Transatlantic Poetry. MadHat Press. ISBN 978-1-941196-79-3.
  12. "Sally Connoly: Transatlantic Poetics: An Autobiography - Plume". Plume. 19 December 2017.
  13. Grief and Meter. University of Virginia Press. 2016. ISBN 978-0813938646.
  14. Yeats annual. No. 17, Influence and confluence. Palgrave Macmillan. 2008-01-15. ISBN 978-0-230-54689-9.
  15. "Book Reviews". The European Legacy (14:4): 473–507. 2009.
  16. George Bornstein (2009). "Of What is Past, or Passing, or To Come': Recent Yeats Scholarship". Modernism/Modernity. 16 (3): 609–614. doi:10.1353/mod.0.0116.
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