KEERY, James 1958-

PERSONAL: Born February 10, 1958, in Coleraine, Northern Ireland; son of Robert (a nuclear engineer) and Rosemary (a teacher; maiden name, Turner) Keery; married Julie Mary Addis (a dental hygienist), September 6, 1986; children: Jennifer, Jack. Ethnicity: "Irish." Education: Churchill College, Cambridge, B.A. (with honors), 1979; University of Durham, Postgraduate Certificate in Education, 1980. Politics: "New Labour!" Religion: "Agnostic." Hobbies and other interests: Postwar British poetry.

ADDRESSES: Home—22 Chiltern Rd., Culcheth, Warrington, Cheshire WA3 4LL, England. Office—Fred Longworth High School, Tyldesley, Wigan, England.

CAREER: Educator and poet. High school English teacher, Wigan, England, 1980-86; Fred Longworth High School, Wigan, England, teacher, 1986-95, head of English department, 1995—. Warrington District Council for the Protection of Rural England, chair, 1990-97. Gives readings from his works.

WRITINGS:

That Stranger, the Blues (poetry), Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1996.

(Editor) Collected Poems of Burns Singer, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 2001.

Work represented in anthologies, including New Poetries, Carcanet Press, 1994; and The View from Kyoto: Essays on Twentieth-Century Poetry, edited by S. Sakurai, Reinsen (Japan), 1998. Contributor of poetry, articles, and reviews to periodicals, including PN Review, New Welsh Review, Poetica, Rialto, and Honest Ulsterman.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A study of J. H. Prynne.

SIDELIGHTS: James Keery once told CA: "It is funny, perhaps even unusual, but I've never been able to shake off the feeling that I've written my last poem. Often I find I have, for months at a time, and perhaps it's natural that a poem should be accompanied by a sense that a spring has run dry. I suppose it's because I tend to write from a present that's already past.

"I can't speak about intention in what is (for me) an unconscious activity, but I find that, when I write, my attention is exclusively to the sound, the rhythm, not so much of the words as of the originating impulse. I'd better draw a distinction between what I mean by this and the lyric epiphany, for the kind of impulse I mean is as likely to give rise to discursive prolixity as to anything more succinct and imagistic. My first collection, That Stranger, the Blues, is made up of both, though most of the prolix dialogic pieces are actually snippets from a series of 'sinless confessional epics' that still come under the heading of work-in-progress. But each of my poems has its originating impulse, in which it is in some sense implicit. I arrive at it by endless retyping of a line, or perhaps two, at a time until I can hear it in what I read."