Hart Crane - Maurice Riordan

Harold Hart Crane was born in Ohio in 1899. In 1923 he became a copy-writer in New York. White Buildings, his first collection, appeared in 1926, and in 1930 his most famous work, The Bridge, was published. A reaction against the pessimism in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, The Bridge
was a love song to the myth of America and its optimism a much needed
boon to post-Wall Street Crash America. Hart Crane committed suicide in
1932.

Maurice Riordan was born in 1953 in Lisgoold, Co. Cork. His first collection, A Word from the Loki (1995) was nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize, as was his most recent, The Water Stealer (2013). Floods (2000) was a Book of the Year in both the Sunday Times and Irish Times, and The Holy Land (2007) won the Michael Hartnett Award. He lives in London and has taught at Imperial College and Goldsmiths College, and is currently Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam
University. In 2013 Riordan was appointed Editor of Poetry Review.