Read Ireland Book Reviews
Issue 365 - 10 February 2007
Irish Poetry
Contemporary Irish Poetry edited by Paul Muldoon
Paperback; (20 Euro publisher’s recommended price) Read Ireland reduced price: 16 Euro / 21 USD / 11 UK; 415 pages
Here the reader can explore substantial selections of the poetry of ten of the most consistently impressive of the postwar poets - Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Durcan, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian. The editor, Paul Muldoon, is widely regarded as the leading Irish poet of his generation. In this anthology he brings together fellow poets who have maintained and extended Yeats's legacy.
Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon
Hardback; Publishers Recommended Price: 23 Euro. Read Ireland Book Review Special Price: 18 Euro / 24 USD / 12 UK; 112 pages [Add To Basket]
Of their recent pamphlet publication, he remarked that 'the poems have to do with a series of historical battles (all beginning with the letter "B" as if to suggest a missing Baghdad), from post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bush's America, in which horses or mules played a major role. Intercut with these battle-scenes are accounts of a battle with cancer by a former lover, here named Carlotta, and a commentary on the agenda of what may only be described as the Bush "regime'". "Horse Latitudes" refer to the area 30 degrees north and south of the equator in which sailing ships tend to be becalmed, in which stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day, and where sailors would throw horses overboard to lighten the load and conserve food and water. The poems present us with fields of battle and fields of debate, 'in which we often seem to have come to a standstill, but in which language that has been debased may yet be restruck and made current to our predicament'. The collection weaves between popular song and riddle, between haiku and densely compressed narrative. It engages the public sphere on equal terms with the most intensely personal elegiac material - 'the fifty years I've spent trying to put it together' - all within the same fiercely vigilant optic, and in a language of inspired happenstance.
General Admission by Paul Muldoon
Trade Paperback; 15 Euro / 19 USD / 11 UK;
Paul Muldoon is, by common consent – in his native Ireland, England and the United States – the outstanding poet of his generation and a leading modern writer. General Admission follows hot on the heels of two new books: The End of the Poem – a series of lectures he delivered as Professor of Poetry at Oxford,and Horse Latitudes, his tenth collection and the first since Moy Sand and Gravel for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Wildly allusive and inventive, it includes ‘My Ride’s Here’, co-written with Warren Zevon and recorded by Bruce Springsteen, and a feast of lyrics for songs he has been performing since 2004 as a member of Rackett, a band that plays ‘what can only be described as three-car-garage rock’. (also available in hardback, priced at 25 Euro)
The House of Clay by Peter McDonald
Paperback; 15 Euro / 19 USD / 10 UK; [Add To Basket]
The House of Clay" is Peter McDonald's fourth book of poems, containing lyrics which combine intense resonance of narrative and imagery with powerful formal concentration. Autobiographical material, founded on a childhood in Belfast during the troubled 1970s, is developed and transformed by the book's other strands: poems on the contemporary Middle East, and poems drawing on Greek and Latin sources (including translations of Pindar and Virgil) build together into a moving and complex meditation on personal and historical loss. McDonald is one of the most widely-known (and most controversial) critics of modern British and Irish poetry; his poetry builds into itself the critical intelligence and anger of that context, along with the visionary intensity of an original, and impassioned imagination. "The House of Clay" creates a new and uncompromising kind of Irish poetry, in which the ancient and the modern, the pagan and the Northern Irish Protestant, find a piercingly clear register.
Globe by Micheal O Siadhail
Paperback; 15 Euro / 19 USD / 10 UK; 120 pages
In his latest collection, "Globe", Micheal O'Siadhail explores how a world is shaped. How do the past and our memories bear on the present? What kind of people help to alter the dynamics of history? How do we face the open wounds of irreversible tragedies and loss? The book's climactic sequence, Angel of Change, catches the mood of immense changes in our times: cyberspace and non-stop trading, mixing of peoples and blurred boundaries, vulnerable and shifting values and in all of this a strange new jazz of possibility - 'Born in a land, I wake in a globe.' This publication marks Micheal O'Siadhail's 60th birthday.
Musics of Belonging: The Poetry of Micheal O’Siadhail edited by Marc Caball and David Ford
Trade Paperback; 25 Euro / 30 USD / 18 UK; 247 pages
Micheal O'Siadhail is one of the most widely read contemporary Irish poets and his poetry has increasingly drawn the attention of critics and commentators. In this intriguing book, some leading Irish, Engish and American literary scholars of his poetry come together with others who approach him and his work through biography, history, art, music, translation, religion and philosophy. Their essays are intended for whoever has enjoyed O'Siadhail's life-loving, intense yet accessible poems.
The Dublin Review Issue 24 Autumn 2006 edited by Brendan Barrington
Paperback; 8 Euro / 10 USD / 6 UK; 112 pages [Add To Basket]
Catriona Crowe: The view from street level: Jane Jacobs and the fate of our cities [essay] Brian Dillon: The enemy within- The idiot Georges Bataille [review-essay] Roy Foster: The red and the green - On Ken Loach’s pseudo-history The Wind that Shakes the Barley Adrian Frazier: Thinking at the top of his voice - The life of Frank Harris, editor of genius, sexologist and scoundrel [essay] Carlo Gébler: from A Good Day for a Dog - A boy and his father go for a ride on the tractor Vona Groarke: Remakes - King Kong and an Irish family Michael West: How Ferencz Renyi kept silent - One of the peculiar things that can happen when you bunk off studying
The Silence Came Close by Kerry Hardie
Trade Paperback; 12 Euro / 15 USD / 9 UK; 80 pages [Add To Basket]
The Silence Came Close" continues Kerry Hardie's act of attention to 'the way things are' in places as familiar as Ireland and as new and exotic as the Pyrenees, Eastern Europe, Australia and China. Because their lessons are so hard-won, 'maybe there's more to life than sickness', the poems in this book intensify the mood of upbeat celebration. (also available in hardback at 20 Euro)
Adaptations by Derek Mahon
Trade Paperback; 13 Euro / 16 USD / 10 UK; [Add To Basket]
These are not translations, properly speaking, but are versions of their originals, Derek Mahon's imaginative, recreative and recreational adaptations, done over the years 'with the idle intensity of doodles', ask to be read 'almost like original poems in English, allowing their sources to remain audible'. Many of them started life in previous publications and now reappear, some slightly revised, in a new context. Some are published here for the first time. The poets represented range from Sophocles to Pasolini, Juvenal to Brecht. There is a large French section which includes a song cycle based on the trobairitz (women troubadours), "The Chimeras" of Nerval and a much admired version of Valery, 'The Seaside Cemetery'. Baudelaire and Pasternak are here, together with a largely recent Rilke group, and the volume concludes with three versions from the Irish of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. (also available in hardback at 25 Euro)
Mocker by David Wheatley
Paperback; 13 Euro / 16 USD / 10 UK; [Add To Basket]
"Mocker" is a book of journeys, from migrating Irish monks to a colony of puffins summering on a sea cliff, from Achill to Llubljana. Amid the unromantic cityscapes of the post-industrial North of England, Wheatley produces a series of meditations on place and displacement. Birds of prey and domestic beasts vie with whalers' wives, Cuchulainn and his cohorts, and St John himself, in the book's richly varied dramatis personae. You go first, the driver of a hearse signals to the poet at a pedestrian crossing and, in work by turns blackly humorous and sensuously affirmative, David Wheatley confronts without flinching the enjoyable dilemma of what has been called 'the trouble with being born'. (also available in hardback at 25 Euro)
The Currach Requires No Harbours by Medbh McGuckian
Paperback; 13 Euro / 16 USD / 10 UK; [Add To Basket]
Medbh McGuckian is the doyenne of poets of her generation. In this, her eleventh groundbreaking collection, there is a new urgency, an acceleration of stanza, line and utterance: ‘All my weariness of the North / revived with double force…’ The book opens with a record of injury and the consequent prayers for her daughter. It proceeds through a series of self-portraits and invocations of women, with their folk instructions and remedies, to construct an historical narrative. Its journey comes to rest in a series of consoling ‘island’ poems. Medbh McGuckian’s code of allegiance to the course of her imagination – see her variations on the colour blue – and the illuminating sensitivity and ardour of her work have fashioned an opus unlike any other. In the unfolding of sense and sentences she is as much a composer of atmosphere and feeling as a maker of poems. The Currach Requires No Harbours lays bare a mastery of art by a stylist of indisputable effect and beauty. (also available in hardback at 25 Euro)
Now by Brendan Kennelly
Trade Paperback; 14 Euro / 17 USD / 9 UK; 104 pages [Add To Basket]
Now is a fast and frenzied meditation on time, ageing, alienation and the pressures of living in the modern city. Each triplet in this book-length poetry sequence addresses the question: What is 'now'? With the brevity of a proverb, each three-liner offers a short, sharp perception which tries to capture or just grasp at the sliding identities of 'now', at the same time as it adds its quickfire nugget of wit or wisdom to the accumulating weight of the whole sequence. By the end of the book, Kennelly has taken us on a journey not just through time but through a dark night of the soul, through his own head and the thoughts and feelings of all kinds of people struggling to survive and find meaning in their lives. Now is published simultaneously with "When Then is Now", a trilogy of Kennelly's modern versions of three Greek tragedies which dramatise timeless human dilemmas as relevant now as they were in ancient times. All three plays - Sophocles' "Antigone" and Euripides' "Medea" and "The Trojan Women" - focus on women whose lives are torn apart by war, family conflict and despotic regimes. (also available in hardback at 22 Euro)
What Then is Now: Three Greek Tragedies adapted by Brendan Kennelly
Trade Paperback; 15 Euro / 19 USD / 10 UK; 212 pages [Add To Basket]
"When Then is Now" brings together Brendan Kennelly's modern versions of three Greek tragedies, Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Euripides’ Medea and Sophocles’ Antigone. All three plays dramatise timeless human dilemmas as relevant now as they were in ancient times. All focus on women whose lives are torn apart by war, family conflict and despotic regimes. In his preface, Brendan Kennelly describes how writing these three plays helped him enormously at difficult times in his own life. "When Then is Now" gives living testament of his belief that 'listening to ancient voices can help us confront, understand and express many problems of today'.
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