Chris Agee

Previously in Belfast, he had worked as a Lecturer in Adult Literacy[8] 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);[9][10] and as a Senior Lecturer employed by the University of Glamorgan to direct the Northern Irish branch of a British trade-union education programme.

[18][19] 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.

"[18] In 1999, Agee's family purchased the house in Žrnovo, a small village on the island of Korčula, part of the Dalmatian archipelago just north of Dubrovnik, in the far south of Croatia.

His second collection, First Light (2003),[20] 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.

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.”[24] In his review of Next to Nothing in The London Magazine (March–April 2009), the English poet Hugh Dunkerley writes: “It is a profound and exceptionally moving book.

I was left with a sense of both the fragility and the huge importance of the here and now, as well as with an expanded sense of poetry's capacity.”[24] On Blue Sandbar Moon: On the dust-jacket, the Irish poet Ciarán O’Rourke writes: “A decade after Next to Nothing, Chris Agee's critically acclaimed and achingly powerful collection of poems in memory of his daughter Miriam, Blue Sandbar Moon: a micro-epic  explores with delicate precision the emotional and spiritual landscape of a life sustained in 'the aftermath of the aftermath'.

Consisting of 174 untitled, interconnected micropoems, the collection evolves with technical grace and meditative clarity to present a holistic and searching vision of worlds in motion – both public and private, natural and imagined, the seen and sensed.

With a characteristically lucent understanding of the inner architectures of memory, grief, hope and art itself, Agee creates a mosaic of days and hours – a ‘micro-epic’ that is at once fluently accessible and formally path-breaking.

Blending the pulse of poetry with the flex and heft of prose, the result is a genre-defying work of deep feeling and distinct literary importance.” Of this volume, the Irish novelist David Park has also written on the dust jacket: “I think it is a monumental work ranging across both the European landscape and the deepest inner worlds.”[25] 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.”[26] 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”.