This volume combines two of novelist and lyric poet James Joyce’s poetry books — Chamber Music (1907), and Pomes Penyeach (1927), featuring a collection of 49 poems — plus “The Holy Office” and “Gas from a Burner.”

"This volume combines two of novelist and poet James Joyce's poetry books-Chamber Music (1907) and Pomes Penyeach (1927)-with "The Holy Office" (1904) and "Gas from a Burner" (1912)"--

Universally known for his groundbreaking prose - especially for the monumental novel Ulysses and its depictions of Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century - James Joyce started off as a writer of lyrical poetry, a genre which he never abandoned in his lifetime and which informs and enriches the rest of his literary production. This volume, which includes Joyce's first published book, Chamber Music, as well as his later collection Pomes Penyeach and several other uncollected poems, reveals a lesser-known facet of the great modernist's artistic career and a glimpse into his poetical sensibility.

This early work by James Joyce was originally published in 1927 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'Pomes Penyeach' is a collection of Joyce's poetry. James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1882. He excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, and then at University College Dublin, where he studied English, French, and Italian. Joyce produced several prominent works, including: 'Ulysses', 'A Portrait of the Young Artist', 'Dubliners', and 'Finnegans Wake. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the early twentieth century and his legacy can be seen throughout modern literature.

James Joyce's book of poems titled Chamber Music was released by Elkin Mathews in May 1907. There were originally thirty-four love poems in the anthology, but two more were added before it was published ("All day I hear the noise of waters" and "I hear an army charging upon the land"). Although it is widely believed that the title refers to the sound of urine tinkling in a chamber pot, this is a later Joycean embellishment that gives an earthiness to a title that was initially proposed by his brother Stanislaus and that Joyce (by the time of publication) had come to dislike: "The reason I dislike Chamber Music as a title is that it is too complacent," he admitted to Arthur Symons in 1906. "I would prefer a title that criticized the work while avoiding outright trashing it." Chamber Music's poetry isn't at all racy or evocative of the sound of tinkling urine, in fact. The poems were well-received by critics despite poor sales (less than half of the original print run of 500 had been sold in the first year).

The essays gathered in Joyce in Progress are the fruit of the First Annual Graduate Conference in Joyce Studies held at the Università Roma Tre in February 2008, and organized by the Italian James Joyce Foundation. They are a testament to the enduring fascination of Joyce's writings and the ongoing liveliness of debate about the writer and his works and contexts. There is a wide array of genuine research on show here, which looks at Joyce from a variety of angles, focusing on his deeply complex autobiographical fiction through genetic studies, post-colonial studies, eco-criticism and intertextual and multi-modal approaches. This volume offers ground-breaking multi-disciplinary readings and usefully connects Joyce’s work with that of contemporary writers, rivals, followers, and successors.