Read Ireland Book Reviews
'Best' Books of 2008 - Poetry
15 December 2008
Fiction
An Leabhar Mor: The Great Book of Gaelic edited by Malcolm MacLean and Theo Dorgan
Hardback; 50 Euro / 76 USD / 38 UK; 320 pages
A 21st-century "Book of Kells" that brings together the work of more than 150 poets, visual artists, and calligraphers. Scotland and Ireland share a mythology, a rich music tradition, languages and some history. Irish Gaels, known as Scoti, invaded Scotland in the 5th century and gave it their name. "An Leabhar Mor" is a major artwork which renews the connection between Gaelic Scotland and Ireland and celebrates the diverse strands of contemporary Celtic culture.
That Ireland shares a mythology, a rich music tradition, three languages and some significant history with Scotland is a fact of which most people are only vaguely aware. A great deal of what has been an enduring connection, however, has been glossed over or deliberately obscured.
It was the Irish Gales known as Scoti, who migrated into Scotland from the 6th century and gave it their name. The most famous artefact from Ireland's golden age, the Book of Kells, was almost certainly begun on the Scottish island of Iona. It was the Gales who united Scotland in the 9th century and made Gales the language of medieval court. The "Irish" Gaelic culture of the Scottish Highlands and Islands went on to survive that of Ireland itself by a century and a half. Scots were "planted" into Northern Ireland from the 17th century and hundereds of thousands of Irish people migrated to Scotland in the 19th and 20th centuries but it is less well known that the Hebridies were once mapped as "the Irish Isles" or that Micheal Davitt was a leading figure in the Scottish Highland Land Leauge.
Amidst the ebb and flow of history, the Book of Kells has become a fixed symbol of the complexity and sophistication of the shared culture that produced it. The Gaelic language remains the most potent living link between both countries. Through the Leabhar Mor the Gaelic community has created another great work of art that renews the connection between Gaelic Scotland and Ireland and celebrates the diverse strands of contemporary Celtic culture.
Collected Poems by Ciaran Carson
Large Format Paperback; 25 Euro / 32 USD / 16 UK; 592 pages [Add To Basket]
Ciaran Carson’s Collected Poems – published on the occasion of his 60th birthday – gathers work from eight breathtaking collections. From the neat shapes and thought of his earliest work, The New Estate, with its influence of Early Irish and Welsh nature notes, to the explosion of energy, inventiveness and verve in The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti; from the increasingly encyclopaedic range and formal dexterity of First Language and Opera Et Cetera to the sustained high pitch and wit of The Twelfth of Never; from the scalpelled precision of his biopsy of the causes and extent of war in Breaking News to the mysterious, moving and half-hinted narratives of For All We Know, his body of work, with its power surges and spikes, emerges as a triumph of style, strange fun and organic wholeness. Collected Poems embodies a conversation with various traditions whose parameters it enforces and stretches. It ensures Ciaran Carson’s place at the cutting edge of contemporary art and secures his position as one of the finest poets at work today. (Also available in hardback, priced at 35 Euro) (I have one copy of a special, slip-cased, signed limited edition left in stock, priced at 125 Euro)
Life on Earth by Derek Mahon
Large Format Paperback; 12 Euro / 18 USD / 9 UK; 62 pages
The publication of a new book of poems by Derek Mahon is a momentous occasion. Life on Earth collects, and adds to, work which has appeared recently in limited editions. It opens with celebrations of notable exemplars: Coleridge, Chekhov, the novelist Brian Moore. This echo poetry extends to ‘Art Notes’ on Hopper, de Staël and others, followed by the eco-poetry of the ‘Homage to Gaia’ sequence on environmental themes. A substantial and positive volume dis--tinguished by its light touch, Life on Earth is the work of a supreme artist. (Also available in hardback, price at 18.50 Euro)
My Love Has Fared Inland by Medbh McGuckian
Large Format Paperback; 12 Euro / 18 USD / 9 UK; 82 pages [Add To Basket]
Medbh McGuckian’s twelfth collection, this ‘autumnal journal’, takes as one of its themes the tracing of a poem’s source and evolution in the conflict of opposites — the elements, the male and female principles, the play of season and light, the confusion between war and peace. Other entries in this introspective book mirror states of feeling including the prelude to a moment of crisis in the author’s life. Bereft by the loss of Marconi’s Cottage, her beloved seaside summer dwelling, she turns for inspiration to the hinterland of the ‘new Belfast’ in an endeavor to pinpoint the relevance or rightful place of the feminine in relation to the contemporary poetic tradition. Medbh McGuckian’s unique meld of metaphor, private — yet intimate — tones, and lyric force testify to the healing alchemy of art. (Also available in hardback, priced at 18.50 Euro)
Selected Poems of Eilean Ni Chuilleanain
Hardback; 20 Euro / 28 USD / 14 UK; 120 pages
The patient, unhurried assembly of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s first collection resulted in an uncommonly accomplished debut. Poems from Acts and Monuments (1972) have already revealed their lasting power. In this timely retrospective they join generous selections from each of her subsequent books down to The Girl who Married the Reindeer (2001). In the words of Ruth Padel (Financial Times) ‘Her eerie blend of the legendary and modern sounds utterly natural. A new book from her is a major event.’
‘There is something second sighted, as it were, about Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s work, by which I don’t mean that she has any prophetic afflatus, more that her poems see things anew, in a rinsed and dreamstruck light. They are at once as plain as an anecdote told on the doorstep and as haunting as a soothsayer’s greetings.’ — Seamus Heaney
At Least for A While by Pearse Hutchinson
Trade Paperback; 12 Euro / 16 USD / 8 UK; 70 pages [Add To Basket]
‘We should all live to be eighty,’ exclaims one of two brothers on a low stool at a high bar in the first poem in Pearse Hutchinson’s new collection. At Least for a While is a book marked as much by simple pleasures and love for ‘the beautiful insulted land, and people’ as by its outraged response to the greedy god, Mammon. In a book of admirations and characteristic sympathy there are poems which chronicle experiences in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Milan, Lisbon and Seville. Closer to home the poet enjoys the sight of dandelions in all their glory and the immaculate flight of a magpie. His journeys into memory, and his re-examination of it, range from reflections on a generous painter and other encounters with art to moments of grief and near-perfection. Now at eighty-one Pearse Hutchinson is composing poems remarkable for their flair, vigour and bold authority. (Also available in hardback, priced at 18.50 Euro).
Points West by Gerard Dawe
Trade Paperback; 12 Euro / 18 USD / 9 UK; 50 pages [Add To Basket]
Gerald Dawe’s seventh collection spans the globe, from Belfast to Boston and Berlin, from a Mediterranean island to his home in County Dublin, and from the irretrievable past, full of half-remembered things and distant echoes, to fugitive voices caught up in the turbulent beginnings of the twenty-first century. Points West is a book of emotionally forceful meditative poems — their plain style and direct expression by now an unmistakable signature. (Also available in hardback, priced at 20 Euro)
Articulations: Poetry, Philosophy and the Shaping of Culture: Seamus Heaney, Royal Irish Academy Cunningham Medal, 28th January 2008
Long Slim Paperback with End Flaps; 45 Euro / 68 USD / 34 UK [Add To Basket]
Articulations: poetry, philosophy and the shaping of culture is a limited, numbered publication; produced in honour of 2008 Cunningham Medal winner, Dr Seamus Heaney, MRIA. The book includes Dr Heaney's Cunningham Medal discourse, and a poem by Paul Muldoon commissioned in honour of Dr Heaney. The Cunningham Medal, the Royal Irish Academy's highest award, was presented to Dr Heaney at a ceremony in the Academy on 28 January 2008. Only 500 copies of this rare item have been printed.
Please note: Prices were correct at time of original posting but are subject to subsequent change without notice.
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