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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 5:02 PM
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The visionary work of an Irish poet appeals to Aingeal Clare... Is there such a thing as a specifically southern (south-of-the-border) Irish poetry? Chafing at the supremacy of poets from Northern Ireland, Sebastian Barry edited an anthology of poets from the republic, The Inherited Boundaries, in 1986. In it, he praised Harry Clifton for his "pact with the marginal" and the "non-profit business" he had built on this. Frequently in Clifton's work it is unprofitable histories that have driven the speaker to the margin, and this is a pattern repeated by his new collection.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 4:49 PM
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The American Library Association (ALA) is proud to announce the first recipients of the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, funded through a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz received the medal for fiction and Robert K. Massie's Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman received the nonfiction prize. The medals recognize the best in fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published the previous year in the United States. The selections were unveiled during the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif. Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/766721#ixzz21I80afAM
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 2:14 PM
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Concordia's School of Canadian Irish Studies welcomes more than 150 delegates. A global array of scholars with a keen interest in the history and culture of Ireland will descend on Montreal for a five-day conference at Concordia University beginning Monday, July 30. The International Association of the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL) is holding its 36th annual conference in Montreal for the very first time as a result of Concordia’s offer to host the event.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 1:56 PM
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FICTION:JOHN BANVILLE is a man of many books, Booker books among them. And most of his reviews, it has been claimed, are eulogies. He has many enemies too, he thinks, because of a diatribe of his on Ian McEwan’s Saturday, and these enemies have no doubt produced hostile reviews of his work. But on book pages and in journals the dominant note has at this point been more and more favourable, if not congratulatory. Seamus Heaney speaks strikingly of his “mischievous, mortally serious way”, Adam Phillips starts a sentence: “No one since Proust . . .” Others say that “everything interests him”, that he is “sublime”, a “lord of language”, a “writer’s writer”. He can certainly be called a reviewer’s writer.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 22, 2012 4:56 PM
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TOM DUDDY:TOM DUDDY, who has died aged 62, was a senior lecturer in the department of philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a poet whose 2011 collection, The Hiding Place, published by Arlen House, was shortlisted for the...
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 2:13 PM
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Read the Kirkus Review of LONG TIME, NO SEE . A young man holds his grief over the death of a friend in check by watching over his granduncle; a quietly impressive (if overlong) fourth novel from the Irish Healy (Sudden Times, 2000, etc.).
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 2:07 PM
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This sprawling first novel is set in a gang-infested Ireland about 40 years from now, when two tough men battle for the love of one woman. “City of Bohane,” the extraordinary first novel by the Irish writer Kevin Barry, is full of marvels. They are all literary marvels, of course: marvels of language, invention, surprise. Savage brutality is here, but so is laughter. And humanity. And the abiding ache of tragedy.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 1:52 PM
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Keith Ridgway recently returned to Dublin after a decade in London. He tells SINÉAD GLEESON about the changes he sees, his new novel, ‘Hawthorn Child’, and the trade-off between writing and life ‘I’M CHAOTIC IN MY approach to work. I can go for months without writing, and regularly do, but I’m always thinking about it,” says Keith Ridgway. “Actually sitting down and writing is something I find very difficult. I have to drag myself to the table, and I’ve never enjoyed it.”
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 4:56 PM
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This eloquent, quietly touching play has much to say about class, custom and the slow decay of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, writes Michael Billington... Sebastian Barry once described this play, first produced at the Abbey, Dublin, in 1995, as "my only out-and-out disaster in theatre". Seeing it revived now by Jagged Fence, it's hard to understand why it failed so badly: it's an eloquent, quietly touching play that has much to say about class, custom and the slow decay of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 2:19 PM
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Present-day London is the setting for Keith Ridgway’s lyrical and insightful new novel tracking two policemen on patrol, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY...HAWTHORN & CHILD/Keith Ridgway Granta 288pp £15.99: HAWTHORN AND CHILD is a working partnership of two very different policemen. Together they patrol a seething present-day, utterly tangible London by car. Child quickly establishes his happyish personality by intoning: “Someone needs to do bad before we can do good.” He cackles at the footpaths “leering at the kerbs”. Hawthorn is a study of unease, prone to nightmares and a range of physical tics.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
September 13, 2012 11:00 PM
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When she moved from Lancashire to Dingle at the age of five, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill found herself temporarily caught between two worlds: one Irish, and Irish speaking, the other English. As she matured, she found that she had to live in both.
Today, Nuala’s poetry explores several worlds: male and female; conscious and subconscious; rational and instinctual; and the “Otherworld” of Celtic legend. The friction between those worlds, she says, produces the energy that both inspires and supports her poetry.
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 2:14 PM
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“Enchanted Ireland” ran from 2nd to 17th June and celebrated the very best of Irish literature for children. Some of Ireland's finest children's authors and illustrators took part in the festival, including current and past laureates ...
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 3:12 PM
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Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Newton Letter were, he argues, books written by a self-confident man from whom he sounds estranged. "Had he been to university, some professor would have warned him off those subjects. But I was free because arrogant, arrogant because free. Some say those are my best books. I think I took a wrong turning with them. Today if I can write a sentence that captures the play of light on a wall, I'm happy."
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 2:10 PM
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From Ireland, poet, novelist and playwright, Dermot Healy. When Dermot Healy's last novel came out - around a dozen years ago - Roddy Doyle declared that "Healy is Ireland's greatest writer". Unconventional and original, Healy puts us right inside the world of his authentic characters. His new book is called Long Time, No See.
Listen to the show
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Scooped by
Gerard Beirne
July 21, 2012 1:58 PM
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POETRY:Dear Life By Dennis O’Driscoll Anvil, 109pp.DENNIS O’DRISCOLL has long been a highly active and, especially in recent years, a highly productive literary figure. Since his New and Selected Poems, in 2004, he has published a volume of essays, another poetry collection and Stepping Stones, his acclaimed interviews with Seamus Heaney. Yet it still comes as a surprise that O’Driscoll, who is 58, has retired from his other life in the Office of the Revenue Commissioners. This surprise is germane to any reading of his new collection, because the book marks a transition between two stages of life and the attitudes that accompany them.
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