Read Ireland Book Reviews
Issue 450
Irish Literature
6/7 June 2009
Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Creddeid & Seven Fables translated by Seamus Heaney
Hardback; 14 Euro / 19 USD / 10 UK; 183 pages
The greatest of the late medieval Scottish makers, Robert Henryson wrote in Lowland Scots, a distinctive northern version of English. He was profoundly influenced by Chaucer's vision of the frailty and pathos of human life. His greatest poem, and one of the rhetorical masterpieces of the literature of these islands, is the narrative "Testament" of Cresseid, set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, which completes the story of Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde", offering a grim and tragic account of its faithless heroine's rejection by her lover Diomede, and her decline into prostitution and leprosy. A work of unreconciled Shakespearean intensity, the "Testament" has been translated by Seamus Heaney into a confident and yet faithful modern English idiom which honors the poem's unique blend of detachment and compassion. A master of narrative, Henryson was also a comic master of the verse fable; his burlesques of human weakness in the guise of animal wisdom are traced with delicate comedy and irony. Seven of the Fables are here sparklingly translated; their burlesque freshness rendered to the last claw and feather. "Seven Fables and The Testament of Cresseid" is an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging encounter between two poets across six centuries.
Plan B by Paul Muldoon with Photographs by Norman McBeath
Hardback; 25 Euro / 32 USD / 19 UK [Add To Basket]
An extraordinarily successful collaboration between the Irish poet Paul Muldoon and the acclaimed Scottish photographer Norman McBeath, in which there's an uncanny relationship between word and black-and-white image. Although a McBeath photograph (of a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene) is directly invoked in one poem, much of the success of this beautifully produced book has to do with indirection and evocation. It's as if this book presents us with a distinctly new genre – photoetry.
'Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection, Plan B, an exquisitely produced collaboration with Norman McBeath, the Scottish photographer. "I sat one evening with the photographs and copies of the poems and, like the kind of party host we've all been encouraged to believe ourselves to be, allowed them to get into conversation with each other," writes Muldoon of his collection, which, he says, was "curated by the poems and photographs themselves." Typically, he's given this new genre a distinctive new name: photoetry.' Robert McCrum, The Guardian
Collected Poems of Seamus Heaney on CD
15 CDs; 85 Euro / 110 USD / 75 UK
Seamus Heaney: Collected Poems is a unique commemorative publication celebrating the 70th birthday of Ireland’s Nobel Laureate. Presented in a stunning 15-CDbox set, Heaney reads his 11 poetry collections from Death of a Naturalist to District and Circle in their entirety, accompanied by a 68-page booklet on the poet’s life and work. Written by fellow poet Peter Sirr, the booklet is illustrated with images of Heaney taken throughout his life.
Making Music: Poems by Patrick Cotter
Large Paperback; 12 Euro / 15 USD / 10 UK; 62 pages [Add To Basket]
Making Music contains more of the 'quirky, strange and thought-provoking' for which Cotter has been praised. Angels in various forms proliferate in this collection, musing on mortality, the centrality of art, the fragility and misguidedness of humanity. The book is rounded off with a pair of Celtic epyllia more influenced by Logue's Homer than by Lady Gregory. (There is also a signed hardback limited to 100 copies edition available, priced at 30 Euro)
Diviner by Eugene O’Connell
Paperback; 10 Euro / 13 USD / 8.50 UK; 64 pages
Diviner secures Eugene O Connell’s place as a particular kind of poet. His poems have an attractive consistency of language and focus in which a specific world accumulates and which is all the better for being assessed in understated terms.
Behind it’s plain speech is a reflective intelligence that recalls ordinary people and events in the Irish countryside. The modest manner is accompanied by a shrewd intelligence and a technique that is attuned to the poet’s sensibility. While there are references to classical and Irish mythology, suggestions of the other world and versions of Seán Ó Riordáin and Eoghan Rúa Ó Súilleabháin, the poet’s eye is focussed on the everyday and the familiar. He is not given to exaggeration nor does he indulge in celebration. He prefers to record through exact delineation, disguising pain, compassion, and loss behind an ironical manner. O Connell is a realist with a sense of humour that emerges in broad strokes, sharp wit, and scorn for human foolishness. Sebastian Brant’s satirical Ship of Fools provides a model for this twenty first century perceptive unmasking. (from Maurice Harmon)
The Complete Recordings of Ulysses on CD
32 CDs; 100 Euro / 130 USD / 85 UK [Add To Basket]
This version of “Ulysses” is a re-issue of the 1982 RTÉ broadcast. A fully dramatised, unabridged and uninterrupted reading of Joyce's most enduring work, the programme features actors and actresses from the RTÉ Players. At the total length of just under 30 hours it ranks as one of the longest speech broadcasts ever produced and is certainly one of the most ambitious and artistically rich.
Ciaran Carson: Critical Essays edited by Elmer Kennedy-Andrews
Large Format Paperback; 25 Euro / 32 USD / 19 UK; 280 pages [Add To Basket]
This collection of thirteen essays, penned by an array of leading scholars in the field, is the first full-length critical study of the Belfast poet and prose writer, and makes a timely appearance in this, the writer’s sixtieth year. Additionally, the book includes an interview given by Carson to the editor.
Ciaran Carson has played a major role in the internationalization of contemporary Irish poetry from the late 1960s, through the ‘Troubles’ of the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, to the present time. Taken together, these essays chart the development of his diverse and prolific career, scrutinizing his experiments in a new urban poetics, including his obsessive concern with maps and labyrinths; they examine his interest in narrative, and explore the continuities between his poetry and his prose; and they consider his relation to various poetic traditions – English Romantic, European Symbolist, Modernist and Postmodernist, Irish language, and contemporary American.
Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives edited by Susan Osborn
Hardback; 39 Euro / 50 USD / 33 UK; 172 pages [Add To Basket]
Elizabeth Bowen has in more recent times been recognised as being as radically important to our understanding of twentieth-century literature as Samuel Beckett and she is now considered among the most highly significant writers of the twentieth century. This collection of essays is intended to broaden the critical framework of Bowen scholarship and to extend Bowen criticism by more clearly mapping her work's position in relation to contemporary critical concerns and its location in relation to twentieth-century literature generally. Combining close textual analysis with theoretically informed readings, in this groundbreaking collection, this group of leading international scholars explores how Bowen's disruptive and deeply unconventional narratives encourage us to read her as one of the most innovative writers of modern fiction, a true progenitor of modernism.The original and freshly illuminating essays chosen for "Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives" cite and expound the dynamics of Bowen's fiction's originality and value. While some essays explore her fictional narratives' Beckettian affinities, her narratives' relation to the Gothic, and the multiple ways her work challenges the norms and boundaries of realism, others examine their representation of Sapphic relations, the unexpected ways her work estranges the conventionally conceived dialogic relation of reader and narrative, and the complex relation of the aesthetic and the ethical in her narratives.Others explore her fiction's unexpected connections to a range of specific historical issues of major consequence during the early and mid-twentieth century including the interrelated questions of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, nation and war. These readings of Bowen's work will have widespread appeal and will be of special interest to scholars and students of twentieth-century English and Anglo-Irish literature, post-colonial literature, writers of the thirties and forties, twentieth-century women's fiction, reading theory, literary realism and literary modernism as well as to the educated general reader.
Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist by Keith Hopper
Hardback; 39 Euro / 50 USD / 33 UK; 272 pages [Add To Basket]
Flann O'Brien's "The Third Policeman", completed in 1940, was initially rejected by his publishers for being 'too fantastic', and only appeared posthumously in 1967. Since then O'Brien has achieved cult status, although critical appraisal of his work has focused almost exclusively on his first novel, "At Swim Two Birds" (1939). By 1940 O'Brien was confronted with two towering traditions: the jaded legacy of Yeats' "Celtic Twilight" and the problematic complexities of Joyce's modernism. With "The Third Policeman" O'Brien forges a powerful synthesis between these two traditions, and the paraliterary path he chooses marks the historical transition from modernism to post-modernism. This groundbreaking study, first published in 1995 and now substantially revised, reconfigures O'Brien as a highly subversive writer within a rich and fertile literary landscape: indisputably Irish yet distinctly post-modern. It identifies "The Third Policeman" as a subversive intellectual satire, in the cutting-edge tradition of Swift and Sterne, and situates it as one of the earliest - and most exciting - examples of post-modernist fiction.
Treasures of the Unconscious by Niall McGrath
Paperback with endflaps; 12 Euro / 15 USD / 10 UK; 116 pages [Add To Basket]
Treasures of the Unconscious follows Niall McGrath’s first full-length selection of poetry, Reversion, as a volume in which the everyday is made ‘strange’ through intensity of perception. The author has in the past been employed in a variety of occupations, such as an arts administrator, postman, hospital cleaner, sailor, and airport worker. He currently divides his time between being a farmer, civil servant, parent, and post-grad student.
The Dublin Review, Number 34, Spring 2009 edited by Brendan Barrington
Paperback; 8 Euro / 11 USD / 7 UK; 108 pages [Add To Basket]
Contents: Greg Baxter :Glitter Gulch - Christmas in Dublin, Texas, and Las Vegas [personal history] ; Peter Cunningham: The case of the missing postman - Echoes of a disappearance – and a silent community [essay]; Brian Dillon: A cinema of happiness - The films of Andy Warhol [review-essay]; George O'Brien: In the compound - Among the migrants in Qatar [personal history]; Ian Sansom: Diary - Carla Bruni fever and other oddities of 2008 [diary]; Jeremy Treglown: Franco's country seat - Reclaiming a gift to the generalisimo [report].
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne: Perspectives edited by Rebecca Pelan
Large Format Paperback; 25 Euro / 32 USD / 20 UK; 350 pages [Add To Basket]
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne has produced over 20 books since 1988: novels in English and Irish, short stories, drama and children’s/young adult fiction, woven through all of which are threads of Irish folklore, linguistic interplay, and Irish/English literary/cultural history. Her work also traverses many of those things that have come to exist as binaries in Irish life today: literature/folklore, high culture/ popular culture, working-class/middle-class, urban/rural, women/men, girls/boys, girls/women, youth/old age, tradition/modernity, old Ireland/Celtic Tiger Ireland, local/international, and, perhaps most controversially of all, Irish/English. This book is a critical anthology of her work from international scholars that results not only a diverse set of critical interpretations but an even broader range of knowledge bases and critical perspectives.
Night & Day: 24 Hours in the Life of Dublin City devised and edited by Dermot Bolger
Large Paperback; 13 Euro / 18 USD / 10 UK; 124 pages, with full colour photos throughout [Add To Basket]
Night and Day is a kaleidoscopic glimpse into a day in the life of contemporary Dublin, a patchwork quilt fo illustrated poems that become snapshots taken on the run amid the flow of busy lives across the new suburbs that necklace Ireland's capital.
For two years, one of Ireland's best-known writers, Dermot Bolger, was a resident artist with South Dublin County Council's innovative INCONTEXT3 Percent for Art Programme. During this time he created a series of poems about everyday life that were displayed in unusual locations - as murals on Luas stops and walls of community centres or as posters in libraries or tax offices.
Bolger saw his work as deliberately forming only one half of a story. Each poem contained an invitation for writers, who live or work in the South County Dublin Council area, to contribute to this work in progress, so that Bolger's poems would merge into a symphony of other voices, creating a tapestry of lives as lived in Ireland today.
Accompanying the poems is an extraordinary series of photographs of South Dublin County taken by INCONTEXT3 Artists, Anne Cleary and Denis Connolly, that provide a visual context to the ever-shifting city that inspired this collaborative book. Night and Day bustles with the sense of modern life, a day filled with busy commuters in cars and on buses and of intimate moments in parks and behind closed doors. It is a unique account of Irish life to be treasured.
External Affairs by Dermot Bolger
Paperback; 12 Euro / 16 USD / 9 UK; 80 pages [Add To Basket]
A companion book to Bolger's recent Night and Day collection of poems about South Dublin, places this sequence in the context of other lives that Bolger's poetry has tried to capture in recent years. It contains Ballymun Incantation, the poem recited by actors and local people as the centrepiece of a public wake to mark the demolition of the first Ballymun tower block and Travel Light a poem about the workmen who built the Dublin Port Tunnel. Although better known as a novelist and playwright, this book shows that Bolger is a poet writing at the height of his powers.
J.M. Synge Travelling Ireland: Essays 1898-1908 edited by Nicholas Grene
Hardback; 25 Euro / 30 USD / 20 UK; 185 pages [Add To Basket]
This volume collects all of Synge's topographical essays in their original newspaper and periodical publication form in the "Manchester Guardian", "The Gael" and "The Shanachie", complete with illustrations, most of them by Jack B. Yeats. There is a substantial editorial introduction with detailed annotation placing the work in the historical context of its period, 1898-1908. Social, political and aesthetic perspectives are explored in the essays, which describe and evoke the Ireland through which Synge travelled. Eighteen of the essays concern the Aran Islands and the west of Ireland of the Congested Districts, from Donegal down to Galway, describing famine relief projects, ferrymen, kelp gatherers, boat-builders, peasant proprietors, small shopkeepers, races and fairs. Nine others deal with County Wicklow and West Kerry, their vagrants, landlords and pastimes. All are enlivened by maps, photographs by Synge himself, title-pages, and above all by Jack Yeats' inimitable drawings.
Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama edited by John Harrington
Paperback; 14 Euro / 18 USD / 12 UK; 642 pages [Add To Basket]
This new edition reprints the complete texts of fourteen plays, by ten major Irish playwrights, with four new to this edition: ‘At the Hawk’s Well’ by WB Yeats, ‘ Pot of Broth’ by Yeats and Lady Gregory, ‘The Weir’ by Conor McPherson, and ‘By the Bog of Cats’ by Marina Carr. ‘Backgrounds and criticism’ contains more than forty reviews and reactions related to the fourteen plays and playwrights included. A section on ‘The Irish Dramatic Revival’ and theatre in Ireland are included, along with a chronology and bibliography.
Please note: Prices were correct at time of original posting but are subject to subsequent change without notice.
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