We’re delighted to announce the publication of our Summer 2024 New Titles:
Cork
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin/Brian Lalor
Cork is a new, revised edition of a book first published in 1977 with poems by Eileen Ní Chuilleanáin and drawings by Brian Lalor. In it a sequence of poems about her native city by one of the finest living writers articulates what is silently revealed in a visual portrait of Ireland’s Southern ‘capital’, its main streets, alleyways, churches, river scenes and quaysides.
As most of these exquisitely detailed drawings were completed half a century ago, often as the wrecking balls approached the buildings and streets they record, there is inevitably an element of remembrance, even of commemoration, of a world that is all but lost to us now.
Displaying the skills of two exceptional artists, Cork is an enduring act of harmony and evocation.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork City in 1942. The Gallery Press has published her ten collections of poems including The Sun-fish which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize and The Map of the World (2023), shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and winner of the Farmgate Poetry Award. Her Collected Poems (2020) won the Pigott Poetry Prize. She served as Ireland Professor of Poetry from 2016-2019 and, in 2022, was elected a Saoi, the highest honour of Aosdána.
Brian Lalor has pursued a varied career as artist and writer with a background in architecture and archaeology. Among his many publications are The Encyclopaedia of Ireland (2003) of which he was General Editor and Ink-Stained Hands (2011), a definitive history of fine-art printmaking in Ireland. He was Chair of Graphic Studio Dublin and Cork Printmakers and joint founder of Blue House Gallery in Schull, County Cork. He is curator of Ballydehob Arts Museum.
108pp
978 1 91133 888 8 €25.00 (hardback)
Custom of the Coast
Paul Muldoon with illustrations by Martin Gale
In Paul Muldoon’s typically inventive drama for two voices one strand recounts the adventures of Anne Bonny, an eighteenth-century pirate from County Cork who roamed the Caribbean until, after being apprehended, her death sentence was commuted because she ‘pleaded the belly’.
A parallel strand reports the shameful case in which the lost pregnancy of an Indian dentist in Galway, Savita Halappanavar, became her death sentence because the law in Catholic Ireland of that time forbade a termination to save the mother’s life.
Custom of the Coast, with music by Kamala Sankaram, will be performed as part of Kilkenny Arts Week 2025 and the book will be launched at Kilkenny Arts Week on 15 August 2024.
Paul Muldoon’s most recent book of poems is Joy in Service on Rue Tagore. One of the world’s great writers, he is Ireland Professor of Poetry. He lives in New York.
Martin Gale is arguably Ireland’s finest painter and illustrator. He shows with the Taylor Galleries and lives in County Kildare.
48pp
978 1 91133 889 5 €17.50 (hardback)
