Poems for the Lockdown - Curran's Hotel, Eyre Square
Coffee Break Read Mon, Apr 27, 2020
THIS TRIBUTE to Curran’s Hotel on Eyre Square is from my second poetry collection Time Gentlemen, Please, published in 2008. Curran’s was one of the main venues in the city for Left wing political meetings of all stripes from the 1970s until its eventual closure in 2002.
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Coffee Break Read Thu, Apr 23, 2020
Sasha de Buyl, director of Cúirt
The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
Poems for the Lockdown - the Leaving Cert
Coffee Break Read Mon, Apr 20, 2020
THIS POEM is from my first collection, The Boy With No Face, which came out in 2005. If I remember right, I wrote it in 2000. It was inspired, or rather provoked, by walking down St Mary’s Road one evening.
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Coffee Break Read Thu, Apr 16, 2020
Susan Millar DuMars, poet and short story writer
Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
What Do You Mean You Haven't Read...?
Coffee Break Read Thu, Apr 09, 2020
John O'Connor, presenter of On My Radio, Flirt FM
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts
What Do You Mean You Haven't Read...?
Coffee Break Read Thu, Apr 02, 2020
Cecilia Danell, visual artist, songwriter
A Wizard Of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin
What Do You Mean You Haven't Read...?
Coffee Break Read Thu, Mar 26, 2020
Gugai - Róisín Dubh music promoter and founder of Strange Brew Records, chooses Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Read more ...Grace upon a time
Coffee Break Read Thu, Jan 14, 2016
He is sitting there, all alone, huddled in the chilly May dew upon a rock dressed in seaweed. His scruffy, woollen coat wrapped tightly around his frailing 84 year old body. The waves, roughly batter around his black, scuffed ankle boots as he licks on an icecream cone. A lonesome seagull is perched on the rock beside him trying to peck at the cornet. ‘Away with you,’ he flummoxed with his tar stained, crinkly hand. ‘Shoo.’ It has always baffled me as to where he can get an icecream cone for his breakfast. The town is a distance away and his feeble waddle would take him a good two hours to walk. I am convinced he lives in the icecream truck hiding behind the Burrishoole, Grace O’Malley castle, over towering beside us. I often hear the jingle of the icecream van but I can never see it.
Read more ...Woman at the Door
Coffee Break Read Thu, Nov 19, 2015
Life’s pictures flicker around me as I linger outside the weather-beaten door. A crow perches on a branch of the skeleton ash on the lawn and a hearse stands in the lane. Bodies hide under a roof of umbrellas. I recognise some, even though years of humanity have battered them. It’s not peculiar that they don’t acknowledge me. They give their condolences to my sister, Margaret. I lost Jamie a long time ago. She’s only losing him now.
Read more ...The Visitor
Coffee Break Read Thu, Nov 12, 2015
After he knocked, the visitor entered the house through a small narrow hallway. He ducked to avoid hitting his head on the low door frame. “Ara, Michael, it is grand to see you at last. Your brother told me you’d come up. How are they all down there in Turlough? They must be delighted to have you home in Mayo. How long has it been? Three years?”
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