Chris Agee

Christopher Robert Agee (born 1956) is an American poet, essayist, editor and publisher living in Northern Ireland. He is the founder and editor of Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and of The Irish Pages Press as well as the author of four books of poems, and one work of poetic non-fiction. He lives in Belfast Northern Ireland, and divides his time between Northern Ireland Scotland and Croatia.

Biography

Early life Chris Agee was born in San Francisco on a US Navy hospital ship and grew up in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bronxville, New York His father was Robert Cecil Agee, a lawyer; and his mother Anne Marie Agee (née Stanford) was a legal secretary.

Agee has a younger sister, Elizabeth Macon Agee, who lives in Brooklyn with her two sons. His paternal uncle is William Cameron Agee, a noted art historian of early twentieth-century American modernism; and his maternal uncle was Thomas Elmer Stanford, one of the most important ethno-musicologists of twentieth-century Mexico, where he lived and worked for over 60 years.

After high school at Phillips Academy Andover and a year in Aix-en-Provence, France (Institute pour des Étudiants Étrangers, Université D’Aix-en-Provence), he attended Harvard University (BA, cum laude, English and American Literature and Language) and since graduation has lived in Ireland.

At Harvard, he did both a versification course and his undergraduate degree thesis (on W.H. Auden) with the poet and classical translator Robert Fitzgerald, who had a considerable literary influence on him. He was also highly influenced by a course taught by the Brazilian philosopher and social theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger, which included many related conversations.

During his year in France, his friends included Montague Don (now a BBC presenter) and Ernst Brunner (now a Swedish poet and novelist); and at Harvard, Mira Nair (now a film-maker) and Julie Agoos (now a poet).

Life and work in Northern Ireland

Agee wrote his first poems in his last year at Harvard, but none of his work was published until the late 1980s in Irish periodicals. in a further education college (now Belfast Metropolitan); as a Tutor at The Open University (both full-time and part-time, including tutorials in HMP Maze and HMP Maghaberry); and as a Senior Lecturer employed by the University of Glamorgan to direct the Northern Irish branch of a British trade-union education programme.

Further literary career Agee edited five books and several special issues of literary magazines before his editorial work on all titles published by The Irish Pages Press.

Agee's own work is included in 12 anthologies, mainly of Irish and American poetry.

His poems, reviews and articles have appeared regularly in The Irish Times since the early 1990s.

Two of his Balkan essays, “The Stepinac File” (2000) and “A Week in Sarajevo” (1996), are widely known outside Ireland. The first, which explores the collaboration of the Catholic Church with the fascist Ustaše regime in Croatia during the Second World War, has circulated extensively on the Internet. The second, written at the end of the Bosnian war, achieved considerable civic renown when it appeared in translation in Sarajevo some months later. His essay on the Kosova War, “A Day with the VJ” (2001), also concerns the Balkans.

Several of his Irish essays – “Weather Report: Good Friday Week, 1998”, “Poteen in a Brandy-cask: The Ethical Imagination of Hubert Butler” (1998), “Heaney's Blackbird” (2007), “The New North” (2008), “The Ethnic Basis of Irish Poetry” (2010), “Troubled Belfast” (2017), “Parable of a Summer” (2018), “The Vote Was Cant” (2019) and “Sundial & Hourglass” (2021), mostly published in Irish Pages, The Yale Review or The Irish Times – are also well known in Ireland and Britain.

In 2001, Agee participated in the “Struga Poetry Evenings” in North Macedonia, Southeastern Europe’s most distinguished poetry festival, which that year awarded its “Golden Wreath” to Seamus Heaney.

In 2003, Agee was an International Writing Fellow at the William Joiner Center, University of Massachusetts, Boston. In 2007 and 2009, respectively, he was a writer-in-residence at the St James Cavalier Arts Centre in Malta, The festival invitation was due to his writings on the Bosnian war.

During his week there, he met many leading Bosnian writers and artists, and witnessed the liberation of the city as the ultra-nationalist Serbian forces withdrew from the surrounding hills from which they besieged the city for nearly four years.

Scar on the Stone was funded by The Soros Foundation and brings together 19 of Bosnia's most distinguished poets, both pre-war and wartime, from the country's three main ethnic groups, as well as several prose extracts illuminating the break-up of Yugoslavia. The translators include Ted Hughes, Kathleen Jamie, Francis Jones, Ruth Padel, Charles Simic, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Harry Clifton, among others. Of this volume, the American journalist Lulu Schwartz wrote: “One of the most important volumes in English brought into print as a result of the worldwide attention paid to the Bosnian war." includes a suite of Balkan poems written in the mid- to late 1990s, and thus constitutes one of the very rare first-hand responses, from an English-language or Western poet, to the immediate post-war aftermath in Bosnia and Kosova. and Fraktura (Croatia's leading literary publisher) in Croatian translation.

In 2019, Fraktura published a bilingual edition of Next to Nothing/Gotovo ništa, translated by Irena Žlof, in tandem with the Croatian translation of Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes.

In 2022, Fraktura chose The Irish Pages Press to distribute in Ireland and Britain three major, celebrated books of fiction translated from the Croatian, as part of a EU Creative Europe project entitled “Facing Insecurities in Contemporary Europe”.

Personal life Agee has a son, Jacob Eoin Agee, a noted translator from Croatian to English, whose translation, Invisible Woman and Other Essays by Slavenka Drakulić, was published by Fraktura in 2022.

His daughter, Miriam Aoife Agee, died suddenly aged four in 2001. Agee's two related volumes of poetry, Next to Nothing (2008) and Blue Sandbar Moon (2018), record the aftermath of this catastrophe.

Critical responses On Next to Nothing:

From the dust-jacket:“Next to Nothing records the years following the death of beloved child in 2001. Though bereft of belief in the poetic outcome compared to the apocalypse of the loss itself (one sense of the title), the fidelity of these poems to the ‘heartscapes’ of grief constitutes, nonetheless, a work of genuine honouring – spare, delicate, and deeply moving.” In his review of Next to Nothing in The London Magazine (March–April 2009), the English poet Hugh Dunkerley writes:“The work has been characterized as emotionally resonant, with reviewers highlighting its exploration of the fragility and importance of the present moment, as well as its illustration of the expressive capacity of poetry.”

In his review in the Dublin Review of Books, “Parables of Intimacy”, the Irish poet and critic Benjamin Keatinge describes the unusual range of “this most transnational of poets” and concludes: “Blue Sandbar Moon is Homeric in its recognition that, from a ‘local row’, as Kavanagh's ‘Epic’ reminds us, the tides of history can be unleashed. But it is Beckettian in its struggle to give voice to loss and grief.”

In a 2020 article in The Irish Times (2 April 2021), Agee himself discusses both books in tandem, as a single ensemble, in “Sundial and Hourglass”.