Read Ireland Book Reviews
Issue 471
20/21 March 2010
Irish Poetry & Fiction
The Best of Irish Poetry (in English) 2010 edited by Matthew Sweeney
Large Format Paperback; 12 Euro / 17 USD / 9 UK; 112 pages
Published annually, the Best of Irish Poetry anthology series present the best Irish poems, in both English and Irish, published in the previous year. Selected from a pool of several hundred published candidates, these represent the top fifty poems of the year. Best of Irish Poetry / Scoth na hÉigse is indispensable for every poetry enthusiast.
This volume includes works by 50 poets, including Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Michael McKimm, Leanne O'Sullivan, Leontia Flynn, Eva Bourke, Kerry Hardie and many others.
The Thing Is by Peter Sirr
Large Format Paperback; 12 Euro / 17 USD / 9 UK; 78 pages [Add To Basket]
From a glimpse of his pregnant wife and the ensuing epiphany, ‘we are walking slowly out of our old lives’, an extended sequence at the heart of Peter Sirr’s new collection conscribes the reality of new life and new joy, including an interlude in rural Ireland. ‘Here you are,’ he writes in ‘The Overgrown Path’, ‘disposed in light / and the company of trees / and here am I, applauding.’ The sureness of his poems’ footing interprets Dublin for a modern age. His preoccupation with language and the integrity of process endures and expands as he continues to translate past and recent experiences into coherent, convincing forms. The book’s coda, ‘Carmina’, is an energetic rendering of the sexual shenanigans and invective of Catullus’s originals. Amplified by broad perspectives and keen intelligence, The Thing Is is the most personal and engaging of Peter Sirr’s seven collections. (Also available in Hardback, priced at 18.50 Euro)
The First Step by Tom French
Large Format Paperback; 12 Euro / 17 USD / 9 UK; 61 pages
Eight years after the appearance of Tom French’s award-winning first collection The Fire Step confirms the promise and achievement of his debut. His ‘gift for creating stunning elegiac moments — and the overall effect of measured and often beautiful responses to the inevitable’ (Nua) extends to a number of poems which celebrate his children in subtle and artful tones and rhythms. Other poems attend to everyday facts of ordinary lives — a family moving house, attending a midday recital, the consequences of a wet summer, and a rail commuter’s journey home. As he traces his bloodlines he embraces various generations, while the book encompasses also a race meet on a strand at low tide, a eulogy on the demise of a letterpress printing works, and the rich imaginings of its longer poems. The Fire Step is a book of requiems and salutations. From already auspicious beginnings Tom French arrives at an impressively accomplished, emotionally charged second stage.
Only This Room by Kerry Hardie
Large Format Paperback; 12 Euro / 17 USD / 9 UK; 62 pages [Add To Basket]
In the Irish Times George Szirtes recognized the ‘unusual warmth’ in Kerry Hardie’s poems and their ‘great density and power of experience.’ Only This Room is her fifth collection. From the ‘headstrong ways’ of herring gulls that ‘threaten and swagger and strut’ and records of experiences in Paris and Spain to sequences attentive to the monastic life on Skellig Michael and in Kells Priory in County Kilkenny this book questions, celebrates and challenges. Ultimately it is concerned with the quiet realization that ‘there is nothing to do in the world except live in it.’
The Sun Fish by Eilean Ni Chuilleanain
Large Format Paperback; 12 Euro / 17 USD / 9 UK; 62 pages [Add To Basket]
The Sun-fish, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, reinforces convictions that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s transforming and transporting ways of seeing are like no other: silk scarves fly at her face ‘like a car wash’; there’s the ‘whisper of a cashmere sleeve’, the nuns’ ‘leathery kiss’ and a lighthouse ‘scraping the sea with its beam’. By now familiar motifs – waves, tides, dividing lines, arches and doorways, journeys, a high tower and water, water everywhere, reprise previous effects and reach forward into new domains. Poems about men and the men in her family, a ‘woman’s story and the stories of women’, elegies, homages and her family’s history, are developed through mist or the gap in a tale. Other poems tease out the tricks of light, at dawn or dusk, to open the lock of language. The title sequence is both alluring and hypnotic. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry is one of the marvels of our time.
The Best of Irish Poetry (in English) 2009 edited by Paul Perry and Nuala Ni Chonchuir
Large Format Paperback; 12 Euro / 17 USD / 9 UK; 112 pages [Add To Basket]
Includes works by Ciaran Carson, Harry Clifton, Vona Groarke, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Thomas McCarthy, Medbh McGuckian, Derek Mahon, Paula Meehan, Sinead Morrissey, Paul Muldoon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Bernard O'Donoghue, Dennis O'Driscoll, Liam Ó Muirthile, Leanne O'Sullivan and others.
The Secret Dublin Diary of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Robert Waldron
Large Format Paperback; 13 Euro / 18 USD / 10 UK; 128 pages [Add To Basket]
The last sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins, fraught as they are with despair, have long intrigued readers and critics alike. In this fascinating and challenging novella, we discover that the poet s inner agony is the result of his homosexuality, which he was compelled to hide from his fellow Jesuits. This is the story of a man who loves greatly, but because of the life he has chosen, he must always dissemble.
The Pen Friend by Ciaran Carson
Hardback; 18 Euro / 23 USD / 15 UK; 253 pages [Add To Basket]
'I write to try to see you as you were, or what you have become. You left no forwarding address: that was part of your intention. For when we wrote those letters to each other all those years ago, we wrote as much for ourselves as for each other. Promising to be in touch, you drifted out of the XL Cafe. Your perfume lingered. Arpege, that 's what it was, not LA 'Air du Temps. Jasmine and rose borne by musk with a hint of sparkling green in its depths. 'More than twenty years after the end of their love affair, Gabriel receives an unexpected and cryptic postcard from his old flame.It is the first of thirteen cards from her, each one provoking a series of reveries about their relationship and prompting Gabriel to write a letter to his ex-lover in which he dwells in sensuous detail on perfumes, clothes, conversations as he tries to recapture the spirit of their romance in 1980s Belfast. 'The Pen Friend' is, however, much more than a love story. As Gabriel teases out the significance of the cards, the layers of meaning in the images and messages, his reveries develop into richly textured meditations on writing, memory, spiritualism and surveillance. The result is an elaborate and intricate web of fact and fiction, a narrative that marries sharp historical insights with imaginative exuberance, a strange and wonderful novel confirming Ciaran Carson a son of Ireland's most exciting writers.
Anderson’s English by Sebastian Barry
Paperback; 11 Euro / 15 USD / 9 UK; 112 pages [Add To Basket]
Celebrated children's writer Hans Christian Andersen arrives, unannounced, for a stay at Gad's Hill Place in the Kent marshes - home to Charles Dickens and his large, charismatic family. To the lonely and eccentric guest, the members of Dickens' household seem to live a life of unreachable bliss. But with his broken English, Andersen doesn't at first see the storms brewing within the family: undeclared passions, a son about to go to India, and a growing strangeness at the heart of Dickens' marriage. "Andersen's English" by Sebastian Barry is premiered at the Theatre Royal, Bury, in February 2010 in a production by Out of Joint.
The Soldier’s Song by Alan Monaghan
Large Format Paperback; 13 Euro / 18 USD / 10 UK; 297 pages [Add To Basket]
Dublin, 1914. As Ireland stands on the brink of political crisis, Europe plunges headlong into war. Among the thousands of Irishmen who volunteer to fight for the British Army is Stephen Ryan, a gifted young maths scholar whose working class background has marked him out as a misfit among his wealthy fellow students. Sent to fight in Turkey, he looks forward to the great adventure, unaware of the growing unrest back home in Ireland. His romantic notions of war are soon shattered and he is forced to wonder where his loyalties lie, on his return to a Dublin poised for rebellion in 1916 and a brother fighting for the rebels. Everything has changed utterly, and in a world gone mad his only hope is his growing friendship with the brilliant and enigmatic Lillian Bryce. The Soldier's Song is a poignant and deeply moving novel, a tribute to the durability of the human soul. Other Reviewer’s Comments: 'A beautifully written, objective tale of one man's war...Devoid of rants against the High Command and armchair generals, and with the interwoven love story remaining understated, The Soldier's Song is a view of a changing world gone mad, and will stay with me for a long time.' --Daily Mail 'Monaghan is an engaging writer - he won the 2002 Hennessy New Irish award for the short story upon which The Soldier's Song is based - and this is a well paced and immensely readable novel.' --Irish Times 'It is craftsmanship of a high order.' --Irish Independent 'Impressive first part of a projected trilogy...The Soldier's Song is a fine story well told.' --Evening Herald 'As with Faulks, Monaghan can expect comparisons to Barker, not least because he plans to write several books in this series. Based on this engaging, unsentimental debut, he'll deservedly find a wide readership.' --Sunday Business Post
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Large Format Paperback; 15 Euro / 20 USD / 11 UK; 672 pages [Add To Basket]
Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Daniel 'Skippy' Juster is his roommate. In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the Frisbee-playing Siren from the girls' school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest - including Carl, part-time drug-dealer and official school psychopath. While his teachers battle over modernisation, and Ruprecht attempts to open a portal into a parallel universe, Skippy, in the name of love, is heading for a showdown - in the form of a fatal doughnut-eating race that only one person will survive. This unlikely tragedy will explode Seabrook's century-old complacency and bring all kinds of secrets into the light, until teachers and pupils alike discover that the fragile lines dividing past from present, love from betrayal - and even life from death - have become almost impossible to read...
The Mango War and Other Stories by Martin Malone
Large Format Paperback; 11 Euro / 15 USD / 9 UK; 161 pages [Add To Basket]
Acutely observed, and often comic, Martin Malone's stories chart the hidden and darker currents beneath everyday, seemingly ordinary, family life. An Irish soldier who brings his Middle-East tour of duty home with him, a car-park attendant who ponders all that he witnesses, two sisters who have always shared everything, and a father and son trapped in a tragic aftermath are some of the deftly realised characters who memorably people these powerful tales of love, loss and betrayal. Cleanly written, and displaying a true gift for dialogue, "The Mango War and Other Stories" is a collection to reckon with.
The Secret Dublin Diary of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Robert Waldron
Large Format Paperback with Endflaps; 14 Euro / 18 USD / 11 UK; 148 pages [Add To Basket]
The last sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins, fraught as they are with despair, have long intrigued readers and critics alike. In this fascinating and challenging novella, we discover that the poet s inner agony is the result of his homosexuality, which he was compelled to hide from his fellow Jesuits. This is the story of a man who loves greatly, but because of the life he has chosen, he must always dissemble.
Apparition and Late Fictions by Thomas Lynch
Hardback; 15 Euro / 19 USD / 12 UK; 214 pages [Add To Basket]
A Methodist minister gone astray, a trout bum gone fishing with his father's ashes, an artist overwhelmed by embodied beauty - these are among the uncommon heroes and exquisite narratives in this first collection of stories by the American poet and essayist, Thomas Lynch. Set in Michigan's north woods, Ohio's interior, on islands, in casinos and distant cities, these fictions are linked by the gone and not forgotten: former spouses, dead parents, and missing children. In pursuit of love and its redemptions, Lynch's characters are haunted by memory, dogged by desire, made radiant by romance and its denouements. With the elegant prose known to the readers of his earlier work, Lynch masterfully creates a world where mirage and apparition are commonplace, where people searching for safe harbour, reconnection and old comforts find them both near at hand and oddly out of reach.
Please note: Prices were correct at time of original posting but are subject to subsequent change without notice.
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