Brought humour to austere Ulster verse

The death on June 20th of poet, singer and songwriter James Simmons brought to an end one of the most successful literary careers…

The death on June 20th of poet, singer and songwriter James Simmons brought to an end one of the most successful literary careers to arise out of Northern Ireland in the last 40 years.

Born in Derry in 1933 and educated at Campbell College, Belfast and the University of Leeds, where he took a BA in English in 1958, James Simmons became the voice of popular culture in the poetry boom in Northern Ireland during the 1960s and 70s. A slightly older contemporary of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, he brought an anarchic humour and sexual frankness to the often austere moods of Ulster verse.

He began his professional career as a teacher in Friends' School, Lisburn, then at a university in Nigeria, a sojourn which lent him themes for many early poems. In 1968, he returned to Northern Ireland to take up a lecturing post at the New University of Ulster in Coleraine where his teaching methods quickly became legendary. He was Writer In Residence at Queen's University, Belfast, from 1985 until 1988.

In 1990, he and his third wife, US poet Janice Fitzpatrick, established a teaching college for creative writing in Islandmagee, Co Antrim. He was still active up to the time of his death on the new Poets House, campus in Falcarragh, Co Donegal, which they set up in 1997.

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Taking his inspiration as much from jazz, blues and folk music as from the more formal literary influences, James Simmons managed to turn the most severe of poetic forms - the sonnet, the elegy and the ballad - to the service of a popular, accessible, expressive, direct and sometimes forbidden poetry. Of his early volumes, Late but in Earnest (1967), Energy to Burn (1971), The Long Summer Still to Come (1973), West Strand Visions (1974) and Judy Garland and the Cold War (1976) marked him out as a unique voice in Irish letters, being among the first to draw equally on the ribald traditions within Swift, Austin Clarke and Kavanagh. He received, among many prizes, both the Gregory and Cholmondely awards for poetry and a Northern Ireland Arts Council bursary. Poems 1956-1986 was a Poetry Ireland choice and a Poetry Society (London) recommendation and won the Irish Publishers'Award in 1986.

In 1969, he founded the magazine The Honest Ulsterman, a publication which was a vehicle for his literary, cultural and political enthusiasms but also provided a valuable platform for new writing at a time when there was plenty to be had. Billed in its first issue as "a handbook for revolution", the magazine became at once the organ of the "northern renaissance" and also established an important means of exchange between contemporary Irish and British writing. The magazine gathered together a coalition of writers and critics (among them Tom Paulin, Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian) who left their stamp on literature and cultural politics in Northern Ireland and further afield.

James Simmons's own ballad, Claudy (commemorating those who died in a no-warning bomb explosion in the village in 1972) and the title poem of his 1985 collection, From The Irish, show a poet whose sense of wider political and social realities is memorable, acute and strident.

In his introduction to Poets from the North of Ireland (1979), the poet and critic Frank Ormsby saw James Simmons as "a reformer or secular evangelist who is firmly on the side of life and freedom" and described his work as pitting "theory against personal experience and human fallibility, especially in the areas of love, sex, marriage, the family, growing old".

James Simmons was also a songwriter and musician and issued three albums of his own songs. Among his recordings were City and Eastern, Love in the Post and Resistance Cabaret.

He edited an important anthology of Irish poetry, Ten Irish Poets (1974) and wrote a critical study of Sean O'Casey (1983. He was elected a member of Aosdβna in 1989.

James Simmons is survived by his third wife Janice and seven children.

James Simmons: born 1933; died, June 2001