We hope you will join us to celebrate the book launch of Cork on Tuesday 29 October at 6.30pm in Waterstone’s, 69 Patrick St, Cork. Guest speaker is writer Thomas McCarthy.
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. She was a founder member of Cyphers, the literary journal (1975). Her first collection, Acts and Monuments, won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. The Gallery Press has published her ten collections of poems including The Sun-fish which won the Griffin International Poetry Prize, The Mother House (2019), winner of the Irish Times Poetry Now Award, and The Map of the World (2023), shorltisted for the T S Eliot Prize and winner of the Farmgate Poetry Award. Her Collected Poems (2020) won the Pigott Poetry Prize. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a Fellow and Professor of English (Emeritus) at Trinity College Dublin. 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. In his role as Director of the architectural department of the Temple Mount Excavations in Jerusalem he solved major issues regarding the city during the classical period. Subsequently he worked with the Smithsonian Institution, the British School of Archaeology and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). 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.
