Reavey, George

(1907-1976)

   Born in Russia of an Irish father and a Russian mother, he lived there until his father was arrested in 1919 and his mother fled with him to Belfast. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied history and literature. He started a literary agency, the Bureau Littéraire Européen (based in Paris from 1932 to 1936, it became the European Literary Bureau, in London, from 1936 to 1939), and the Europa Press imprint, an important vehicle for Irish poets' work. To coincide with the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, Europa Press published Thorns of Thunder, the first collection of English translations of poems by Paul Eluard. During World War II Reavey served in Madrid and the Soviet Union with the Foreign Office, and in 1946 he moved to America to teach Russian literature, and lived the rest of his life there. Two of his collections are Colors of Memory (1955) and Seven Seas (1971). Some of his poems: "'How many fires,'" "Dismissing Progress and Its Progenitors," "Never," "The Bridge of Heraclitus."

   Sources: English and American Surrealist Poetry. Edward B. Germain, ed. Penguin Books, 1978. Surrealist Poetry in English. Edward B. Germain, ed. Penguin Books, 1978. The Book of Irish Verse: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from the Sixth Century to the Present. John Montague, ed. Macmillan, 1974. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Faber Book of Irish Verse. John Montague, ed. Faber and Faber, 1978. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).