The Gallery Press hopes you will join us to celebrate the publication of Custom of the Coast by Paul Muldoon (with illustrations by Martin Gale) at an afternoon book launch in Books Upstairs, D’Olier Street, Dublin on Saturday 17 August at 2.30pm. Free admission. Reserve a place.
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)
