Read Ireland Book Reviews
Issue 384 - 21 July 2007
Irish Literature and Poetry
Cheating at Canasta by William Trevor
Hardback; Publishers Recommended Price: 26 Euro. Read Ireland Price: 21 Euro / 30 USD / 15 UK; 236 pages
'No matter what,' Julia had said, aware then of what was coming, 'let's always play cards.' And they did; for even with her memory gone, a little more of it each day — her children taken, her house, her flowerbeds, belongings, clothes — their games in the communal drawing room were a reality her affliction allowed.
A husband sits in Harry's Bar in Venice, thinking of his wife — lost to him now — whose plea has brought him back to one of their favourite haunts. On another table, a young couple quarrel. Cheating at Canasta is the title story of William Trevor's new collection, his first since the highly acclaimed A Bit on the Side (2004), and its themes of missed opportunities, the inevitability of change and the powerful but fragmentary quality of our memories are entirely characteristic of his unparalleled oeuvre.
Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories by John McGahern
Paperback; Publishers Recommended Price: 17 Euro. Read Ireland Price: 13 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 408 pages [Add To Basket]
McGahern's command of the short story places him among the finest practitioners of the form, in a lineage that runs from Chekhov through Joyce and the Anglo-American masters. When the collection was first published in 1992, the "Sunday Times" said 'there is a vivid pleasure to be had in the reading of these stories,' while for Cressida Connolly in the "Evening Standard" 'these wonderful stories are sad and true... McGahern is undoubtedly a great short story writer.' Many of the stories here are already classics: "Gold Watch", "High Ground" and "Parachutes", among others. McGahern's spare, restrained yet powerfully lyrical language draws meaning from the most ordinary situations, and turns apparently undramatic encounters into profoundly haunting events: a man visits his embittered father with his new wife; an ageing priest remembers a funeral he had attended years before; a boy steals comics from a shop to escape the rain-bound melancholy of a seaside holiday; an ageing teacher, who has escaped a religious order, wastes his life in a rural backwater that he knows he will never leave.
Paula Spencer by Roddy Doyle
Paperback; 11 Euro / 15 USD / 8 UK; 276 pages
When we first met Paula Spencer - in "The Woman Who Walked into Doors" - she was thirty-nine, recently widowed, an alcoholic struggling to hold her family together. Paula Spencer begins on the eve of Paula's forty-eighth birthday. She hasn't had a drink for four months and five days. Her youngest children, Jack and Leanne, are still living with her. They're grand kids, but she worries about Leanne. Paula still works as a cleaner, but all the others doing the job now seem to come from Eastern Europe, and the checkout girls in the supermarket are Nigerian. You can get a cappuccino in the cafe, and her sister Carmel is thinking of buying a holiday home in Bulgaria. Paula's got four grandchildren now; two of them are called Marcus and Sapphire. Reviewing "The Woman Who Walked into Doors", Mary Gordon wrote: 'It is the triumph of this novel that Mr Doyle - entirely without condescension - shows the inner life of this battered house-cleaner to be the same stuff as that of the heroes of the great novels of Europe.' Her words hold true for this new novel. Paula Spencer is brave, tenacious and very funny. The novel that bears her name is another triumph for Roddy Doyle.
The Dublin Review number 27, Summer 2007 edited by Brendan Barrington
Paperback; 8 Euro / 12 USD / 6 UK; 112 pages [Add To Basket]
Fergus Allen : Interference - An intruder in the mind [short story]; Greg Baxter: Just throwing them meat - Why it is necessary to read before you write [essay]; Brian Dillon: Golden hours - The films of Tacita Dean [review-essay]; Nicholas Grene: The staffman of the Vizards - Remembering an extraordinary neighbour [memoir]; Vona Groarke: It hot? - A sojourn in the South [essay]; Colin Murphy: Green sugar - The rise and fall of the Irish sugar industry [report]; David Wheatley: E.M. Cioran and the art of disgrace - The great Romanian aphorist and his indefensible past [review-essay]
Field Day Review 2007 edited by Seamus Deane and Breandan Mac Suibhne
Large Format Paperback with Endflaps – 40.00 Euro / 60.00 USD / 30.00 UK; 310 pages
ESSAYS ~ Seamus Deane, Walter Benjamin: The Construction of Hell ~ Stephen Rea, Keep Goin . Gotta Keep Goin . : Remembering Robert Altman ~ Brian Dillon, An Interview with Tim Robinson ~ Tim Robinson, Twilight on Old Stones ~ Catherine Gallagher, War, Counterfactual History and Alternate-History Novels ~ Guy Beiner and Joep Leerssen, Why Irish History Starved: A Virtual Historiography ~ Jennifer Todd, Trajectories of Change: New Perspectives on Ethnicity, Nationality and Identity in Ireland ~ Richard Kirkland, That Car : Modernity, Northern Ireland And The Dmc 12 ~ Alan Ahearne, Global Imbalances: The Risks for The World Economy ~ Conor Gearty, Rethinking Civil Liberties in a Counter-Terrorism World ~ Jackie Nickerson, Images from Faith REVIEW ESSAYS ~ Terry Eagleton, Bodies Once Again ~ Deana Heath, India, Identity and Globalization ~ Brendan O Leary, Cuttlefish, Cholesterol and Saoirse; ~ Ian McBride, Ireland s History Troubles ~ David W. Miller, Varieties of Irish Evangelicalism ~ Michael Rubenstein, Revisiting the City, Revising Nationalism ~ Matthew Kelly, Nothin To do but walk up and down? ~ Mary P. Corcoran, Consumption and Identity ~ Timothy W. Guinnane, Returns, Regrets And Reprints ~ Joep Leerssen, The Big CHIL ~ Ciaran Carson, How To Remember? ~ Bríona Nic Dhiarmada, Pied Beauty REVIEWS Emer Nolan, Thomas Kilroy, Ultán Gillen, James Kelly, Brendan Kane, David Owens
The Mouth of a River by Sean Lysaght
Paperback; 12 Euro / 16 USD / 8 UK; 84 pages
Seán Lysaght’s new collection opens with a sequence on the landmarks and wild creatures of his adopted territory in north Mayo. These poems are a prelude to a longer work where the angler protagonist goes in search of salmon and sea trout along an unidentified river. In the process of an encounter with this treasured heritage he must also come to terms with an historical legacy of suffering and deprivation, which in turn gives a new urgency to his view of the natural world. The third section comprises a set of poems on the Sweeney legend using images and insights from Lysaght’s beloved bird lore. Approaching the mediaeval bird-man through the lens of the scientist delivers surprising variations on a traditional story. Throughout this collection we see the poet’s familiar landscape ranged in a new field of vision. This latest engagement with nature and tradition marks The Mouth of a River as Seán Lysaght’s most ambitious, impressive and appealing book to date. (Also available in hardback, priced at 18.50 Euro)
Next Door by John McAuliffe
Paperback; 12 Euro / 16 USD / 8 UK; 62 pages [Add To Basket]
John McAuliffe’s first collection was widely praised in Ireland and England: ‘powerfully sensual . . . The poems create memorable, unfamiliar images and a compelling sense of mystery’ (TLS), while The Irish Times described the book as ‘moving and deceptively astute’.
Next Door, his second book, moves between the ‘silvery dark’ outskirts of Irish towns and English cities ‘where the beautiful / suburbs climb and sprawl’, between children’s games and neighbourly tensions, and between the ‘shine and whirl’ of the workaday world and ‘karaoke, blues and big band . . . greenly adrift in the public park’. The domestic world is pictured in long, scrolling sentences in poems that explore complex relationships with love and death and dramatize how the present moment exists at the mercy of random forces and echoes of another life. (Also available in hardback, priced at 18.50 Euro)Hawks and Doves by Alan Gillis
Paperback; 12 Euro / 16 USD / 8 UK; 80 pages [Add To Basket]
Many of the poems in Hawks and Doves are in transit, by car or by foot, coming or going, their personae wondering ‘what to do, who to be, the way things are’. They shift swiftly, but uneasily, between what’s outside the door and what’s on-screen: between Belfast with its processes of ‘normalization’, and a wider world riven by conflict, poverty and environmental havoc. Many deal with families, parenthood and responsibility — with the hawks and doves that circle the home, the heart, and the head. Exuberant love poems mingle with scabrous parodies of self-satisfied apathy and masculine aggression. In their formal virtuosity, linguistic incandescence and imaginative intelligence, these poems are deeply affecting and often searing examinations of the world in which we’re living. Ending with major pieces that traverse the waste and beauty of our time, Hawks and Doves is an unforgettable trip. (Also available in Hardback, priced at 18.50 Euro)
Collected Poems 1956-2001 by Thomas Kinsella
Paperback; 15 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 378 pages [Add To Basket]
Thomas Kinsella stands apart in modern Irish poetry. His work, employing traditional and modernist elements in individual poems and open sequences, deals in a range of subjects from the most intense and psychic privacy to political satire and social commentary, from love and the enabling feminine to metaphysical speculation in a variety of earthly settings. Kinsella is a city poet. Born in Dublin in 1928, he attended University College, and entered the Irish Civil Service, but resigned from the Department of Finance in 1965 for a career in poetry in the United States. He published from the beginning with the Dolmen Press, later co-publishing his poetry and translations with Oxford University Press. His translations from the Irish include the Iron-Age prose epic "The Tain" and "Poems of the Dispossessed: 1600-1900". He is editor of the "New Oxford Book of Irish Verse".
Selected Poems of Thomas Kinsella
Paperback; 10 Euro / 14 USD / 7 UK; 184 pages [Add To Basket]
Thomas Kinsella is among the most distinguished modern poets. His work over fifty years has challenged and enriched the poetic landscape. Rooted in locality, Kinsella's poetry employs myth and modernism in explorations that range from intense lyricism to political satire and social commentary. This representative selection of the poetry he has published from 1956 to 2006 invites readers to explore the range of his poetic world.
Poems 1956-2006 read by Thomas Kinsella
Audio CD; 22 Euro / 30 USD / 15 UK [Add To Basket]
In August 2006, in Dublin Thomas Kinsella recorded a comprehensive selection of his poetry, from Another September (1956) and Downstream (1962) through to the most recent poems in the Peppercannister series, published in 2006. From this body of material published over a period of 50 years, Mr Kinsella then selected the poems the poems hereby issued as Thomas Kinsella: Poems 1956-2006 by Claddagh records.
The sustained achievement of these recordings covers a career in poetry by one of Ireland’s greatest poets. The powerful impact of Thomas Kinsella’s reading of his poetry has been welcomed with universal acclaim.
“As my friend, Tom Kinsella knows I have long and deeply admired his poetry. Further to this, Thomas Kinsella’s inspired translation of TÁIN BÓ CUAILNGE has given me the greatest graphic adventure of my life” from Louis le Broquy
“Thomas Kinsella’s ability in the use if detail, rhythm and texture – to describe personal places or, through them, to explore philosophical and metaphysical issues – is masterly.” From Maurice Harmon
Complicated Pleasures by Billy Ramsell
Paperback; 11 Euro / 15 USD / 7 UK; 75 pages [Add To Basket]
BILLY RAMSELL was born in Cork in 1977 and educated at the North Monastery and UCC. He began writng seriously in 2000 when he moved to Barcelona. In 2005 he was shortlisted for a Hennessy award and his poems have appeared in various publications. He lives in Cork where he co-runs an eduational publishing company. The poems in Complicated Pleasures exist on the border between the personal and the political, combining delicately lyrical meditations on love, art and memory with darker works that confront full-on the pressures and uncertainties of an urban globalised world. Wide in range, diverse and energetic in their forms, these poems seek to strike a balance between expression and exploration. They attempt to stake out a 'personal space' in a violent world of systems, machines and twenty-four hour surveillance where privacy, language and even memory itself are under permanent threat. Complicated Pleasures is a first collection of considerable daring and undeniable accomplishment
The Tamarit Poems & a Selection of poems from Arabic Andalusia by Federico Garcia Lorca translated by Michael Smith
Paperback; 11 Euro / 15 USD / 8 UK; 115 pages [Add To Basket]
In Lorca's Tamarit poems, the dominant theme is that of life/love and death. He returns to Andalusian material, specifically to his native city of Granada, for images and atmosphere, among other things. Traditional ballad rhythms can also be heard, yet experimentation in rhythm and images and other techniques is also evident. The Tamarit Poems is considered by many Lorcan scholars as among his finest work. Translator Michael Smith also includes 36 of his translations of poems from Arabic Andalusia by way of background.
The Formation of an Irish Literary Canon in the mid-Twentieth Century by Wei Kao
Trade Paperback; 30 Euro / 40 USD / 20 UK; 265 pages [Add To Basket]
This scholarly study of the formation of the Irish literary canon in the first half of the twentieth century provides fascinating and often surprising insights into the ways in which different educational institutions responded to the political and historical changes taking place as Ireland moved from colonial to postcolonial status. Dr Wei H. Kao discusses not only what was included on school and university curriculum but also writers who were excluded, in particular women writers who appeared to interrogate a male nationalist agenda for the representation of Ireland. - Emeritus Professor C.L. Innes The writers discussed include Daniel Corkery, J.G. Farrell, Denis Johnston, Mary Lavin, Iris Murdoch, Kate O'Brien, Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty, and James Plunkett.
Please note: Prices were correct at time of original posting but are subject to subsequent change without notice.
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