We’re delighted to announce the following forthcoming titles which are due for publication in late September and early October:
Old Friends
– poems in Irish by Aifric Mac Aodha translated by David Wheatley
Much of Aifric Mac Aodha’s new collection, Old Friends, is made of longer poems or sequences whose individual parts possess the force of aphorisms. Drawing on old Irish sayings and idioms her often musical lines (‘Cuireann an chuimhne, cara an chumha . . . ’) are matched by David Wheatley’s fluent verses. From ‘a lad in a tattoo parlour’ and a ‘woman vet on television’ to a cyst on a spinal cord and a series centred on the horses in Friesland, her poems amplify what Clíona Ní Ríordáin has identified as ‘a strong female, feminist voice endowed with a canny sense of the unheimlich’. David Wheatley, subscribing to Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation as an act of creative echoing, offers again a perfect complement to them.
National Theatre
– John McAuliffe
‘For all the amiable good humour of the voice of these poems, they never stray far from the things that really matter in modern life,’ Bernard O’Donoghue wrote of John McAuliffe’s Selected Poems. ‘The domain of the imagined is always at the service of the world we know, to cast light on it.’ The poems in National Theatre go further, navigating present-day strains and pleasures even as events — driven by national politics and global weathers — alter and define their range.
The title poem’s ‘storms of hot air’ generate turbulence which clouds the currents of everyday routines. Horace, the Roman lyric and elegiac poet, remains a touchstone for John McAuliffe’s civic poetics and Rome itself becomes a character in the book, host to a G20 summit whose crisis management recalls the cycles of violence which that city has survived.
Other writers — Derek Mahon, Martin Amis — are subjects of notable elegies. ‘Domestic’ poems dramatize, with tact, joy and sadness, the evolving relations between child and parent. All through, art’s place in human days is valued as ‘life swims / into the fortress of a formal device’.
Harmony (Unfinished)
– Grace Wilentz
Grace Wilentz’s first collection, The Limit of Light, was selected as a book of the year in The Irish Independent and The Irish Times. In her second, Harmony (Unfinished), are poems about hesitating at the borderline of risk, and proceeding anyway. The book plays on, and off, its epigraph, ‘Why not the life?’, exploring the ways artists carve the groove of daily practice. Though these poems are rooted in an acute feeling of the passage of time they create space for exploring the worlds we make apart from the one we are presented with.
Taking us from Ireland to Brazil and back again, with a few diversions, the poems in Harmony (Unfinished) reveal a gentle sensibility: ‘That night we saw / the moon is born in the river.’
Castel Gandolfo
– Jim Nolan
Castel Gandolfo, new play by Jim Nolan, revolves around the cataclysmic exposure of a Waterford family’s deepest and most secret wounds.
‘Water under the bridge, Rose. Twenty-five years of it. Whatever happened . . . ’
If only it were so easy to forget. In the backyard of Castel Gandolfo, a decaying terraced house in Waterford’s inner city, Tony (‘the sixth Beatle’) is restoring the vintage car he hoped he’d have ready to take his father in on one last excursion but he’s in a coma. His sister Rose is about to lose her job in the Snow White Launderette, his daughter Stella is thinking of dropping out of college without finishing her Law degree. His mother Dolly appears — as does another family member — and suddenly the long suppressed facts of their lives need to be aired. In Jim Nolan’s latest, enthralling instalment of the chronicles of his native city the question for each of the characters is whether they can live up to Stella’s wisdom: ‘The past doesn’t go away. But you don’t have to stay chained to it either.’
The premiere of Four Rivers’ Castel Gandolfo, directed by Ben Barnes (Artistic Director of Four Rivers), takes place Garter Lane Theatre on 4 October 2024 and the book will be launched at an event in Book Centre, Waterford at 6:00pm on Friday 11 October.
