Signes: A Review of Ciaran Carson’s ‘From Elswhere’ For a poet, there are easier things than translations. The translating poet inevitably has to face the gnawing burden of writing for two people. “It’s a desperate system of double-entry bookkeeping,” Howard Nemerov lamented. The spectral presence of the author is always hovering somewhere, ready to […]
The Boys of Bluehill by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin review — distinctive and rewarding A murmur of nuns, dens, ruins … Ireland’s secret histories and the pain of the past echo through this powerful collection The late Peter Porter had a peculiar blind spot where modern Irish poetry was concerned. Irish poets, he suggested in […]
The Rooms is Peter Sirr’s eighth collection. A beautifully orchestrated meditation upon the meaning of the word ‘home’, it weighs in at just over one hundred pages and is thus a substantial addition to his work. By profession, Sirr is a linguist, teacher and translator who, like Joyce, Mahon, Clifton, spent many years abroad. It is not […]
THE LISTENER The Outnumbered Poet: Critical and Autobiographical Essays, by Dennis O’Driscoll It must have been in the early 1980s that I first met Dennis O’Driscoll, possibly after he published his first poetry collection, Kist (1982), and before the follow-up collection, Hidden Extras (1987). Dennis contributed to a review I was editing in Galway called […]
FROLICKING IN THE ETHER The Dead Zoo by Ciaran Berry The “personhood debate” is news that stays news, ready to be puzzled over with each slow birth and slow death. To the expectant mother, the creature kicking inside her, in its infinite strangeness and infinite potential, may seem more fully another person than the newborn infant, […]
It is good to see the publication by The Gallery Press of the late Dennis O’Driscoll’s The Outnumbered Poet, Critical and Autobiographical Essays. Known for his wide-ranging interest and encyclopaedic knowledge of the poetry scene, this posthumous collection will be widely welcomed as a companion to his earlier Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams. This furthers a […]
Recycling preoccupations and obsessions Derek Mahon’s introduction to Echo’s Grove (Gallery, €22.50/ €13.90), his collected translations, describes how he looks for “affinities of idea, shape and atmosphere” between his work and the work of those he chooses to translate. As well as exhibiting his taste, this new book might be said, then, to recycle (a […]
Conor O’Callaghan’s The Sun King reviewed by Maria Johnston ‘A piece of garbage I had around’, John Lennon unceremoniously dubbed his ‘Sun King’, the second song of the ground-breaking medley or ‘song montage’ that closes the Beatles’ final, ‘end of the line’ album Abbey Road (1969). Making innovative use of recording studio technology to orchestrate existing ‘bits […]
(Conor) “O’Callaghan’s best book to date…” High praise for The Sun King which includes the already cult-followed The Pearl Works in last Saturday’s Irish Times http://bit.ly/12VxYGN
Happy Hour — Andrew Jamison Sad and wonderful tension between what is sublime and what is commonplace — an astonishment at this world, augmented by the sardonic awareness that astonishment is nothing new – permeates themes of transience in Andrew Jamison’ first collection, Happy Hour. Critics may find some of these poems hackneyed, but I believe […]
The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree Kerry Hardie’s newest collection is a dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality. Death is, of course, such a common theme in poetry that it’s difficult to find anything new to say about it, but Hardie succeeds, injecting into these poems her usual quiet originality. For […]
“[Selected Prose] is Mahon unplugged, meditating on all things that have mattered to him over the stretch of his writing life to date. The volume, under the discrete narrative of individual essays and reviews, merges into a composite picture of the poet himself and the world he imagines, as much as the one in which he […]
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