Read Ireland Book News - Issue 90 - New Irish Plays and Poetry
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The Beauty of the Moon by Anne Haverty (Paperback; 9.50 IRP / 13.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Anne Haverty's first collection of poetry is infused with the yearning and disillusion that we associate with the fin de siecle. Haunted by a sense of the passing of time and its mutabilities, the poems are also meditations on the inevitability of separateness - between mothers and daughters, town and country, past and present, life and death. Wonderfully varied inform and content, this collection introduces a poet of considerable range and talent.
Brow Head by John Boland (Paperback; 10.75 IRP / 15.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
John Boland's poems are both melancholgy and vital, says Frank Ormsby. Celebrant and elegist, Boland writes movingly, with passionate restraint, of the joys and insecurities that give tension to our lives. And Thomas Kilroy wrote about this collection: These fine poems speak to us with direct lucidity and moral energy about the frail connections of human relationships. The book creates a highly literate, personal, inner world.
A Little Bit of Heaven: An Irish-American Anthology by Sean McMahon (Paperback; 7.99 IRP/ 12.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
This anthology consists of popular songs, verse and prose, which reflect the experience of the Irish in America. It includes such perennial favourites as: 'A Little Bit of Heaven', 'When Irish Eyes are Smiling', 'Mush, Mush, Too-ral-I-aday', 'Macnamara's Band', 'Mick McGilligan's Ball'. The work of such 'native' Irish-Americans as Finley Peter Dunne, George M. Cohan and Chauncey Olcott features, as well as verse by John Boyle O'Reilly, Thomas D'Arcy magee and J.I.C. Clarke. This book is a treasure trove for all those interested in traditional and popular music, Irish and American alike.
The Friendship Tree: The Life and Poems of Davoren Hanna (Paperback; 7.99 IRP / 12.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
This book is the story of a young Dublin-born writer, Davoren Hanna (1975-1994), a gifted, cunning and oftne ruthless poet who, while profoundly handicapped, struggled to do justice in language to the turbulence and wonder within him. Davoren's mother (1944-1990), a deeply intelligent and passionate women, battled for years against the helplessness and scepticism of the experts in the face of Davoren's handicpas and, in the end, literally laid her life on the line to help give her son a voice. In this book Davoren's father, Jack, gives a searing account of the heartbreak and exhileration behind the sometimes baffling public face of his son, whose poetry won acclaim in Britain and Ireland, and whose ebullient spirit won the hearts of those he touched during his short life.
Observatory by Daragh Carville (Paperback; 6.99 IRP / 10.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
This play is set at the Armagh Observatory and Museum for Astronomy and Natural Philosophy, in both 1799 and 1999. Jon McKenna, hired to compile a computerised catalogue of the Observatory archives, finds his life becoming entangled with that of Nicola McLoughlin, assistant astronomer at the Observatory. Together they work to uncover the 200 year old story of astronomer Archibald Hamilton and his assistant Robert Hogg - man of science, man of God, and revolutionary. A gothic thriller, Observatory details the entangled lives of four people across two centuries. The Observatory, a symbol of both science and religion, becomes the setting for a powerful exploration of nationhood and revolution, love and betrayal.
Many Young men of Twenty/Moll/The Chastitute by John B. Keane (Paperback; 9.99 IRP / 15.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
John B. Keane, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday, is an Irish literary legend. He has lived in Listowel, Co Kerry, for most of his life, where he presides over one of the liveliest and most literary pubs in the country. The three plays collected here are among his best works for the theatre. Many Young Men of Twenty, a musical play, deals with emigration and the lack of jobs at home that forced people to leave their native Ireland for England. Moll is a hilarious and highly successful comedy about Irish life in an Irish country prebystery. And in The Chastitute, the author holds some very 'sacred cows' up to ridicule via the main character who is a person without holy orders and who has never lain down with a woman.
Rough Magic First Plays edited by Siobhan Bourke (Paperback; 11.99 IRP / 17.40 USD) [Add To Basket]
This anthology of 'first plays' by Irish writers reflects the diversity and innovation that has come to describe contemporary Irish theatre, epitomised by the creative output of Rough Magic Theatre Company from its formation in 1984. From the glamour and excess of classic Hollywood to a darkly comic exploration of adolescent sexuality in the provincial backwaters of 1970s Ireland, what these plays have in common is an authentic and original vision and a tale worth telling. The plays included are: I Can't Get Started by Declan Hughes; The Dogs by Donal O'Kelly; Down Onto Blue by Pom Boyd; Hidden Charges by Arthur Riordan; Danti-Dan by Gina Moxley; and Mrs. Sweeney by Paula Meehan.
The Ballad of HMS Belfast by Ciaran Carson (8.00 IRP / 11.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
This compendium, made from the poet's previous collections, reveals one of the most remarkable and sustained tours de force in contemporary poetry: the poet's reimagining of his native city of Belfast. Carson introduces the reader to a city as full of surreal narrative and imaginative possibility as Borges' Buenos Aires or Calvino's Venice; at the same time he never shirks from taking a hard look at the city in all its political and cultural complexity.
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