Sara Baume - walking the thin line

Literature Reviews Thu, Mar 30, 2017

THERE IS something of a desolate feeling about the opening line of Sara Baume’s second novel, A Line Made By Walking, just published by Tramp Press: “A smudged-sky morning, mid-spring. And to mark it, a new dead thing, a robin."

What is poetry?

Literature Reviews Thu, Mar 09, 2017

BACK IN the day, when the only poetry textbooks in our secondary schools were Intermediate Cert Poetry and Leaving Cert Poetry, should an intrepid pupil have the temerity to ask “What is poetry?” the answer generally given was “a lyric”.

Two women’s poems of experience

Literature Reviews Thu, Mar 02, 2017

POST-HEANEY, Irish poetry is in desperate need of a 'next big thing'. It should, preferably, be a poet with a haircut sufficiently stylish to allow him/her at least pretend to be young.

Protest prayers of the Hello magazine era

Literature Reviews Thu, Feb 09, 2017

AN EMINENT literary gent recently used the pages of a leading poetry journal to take issue with “the new troubadours of protest and dissent whose combative views” are, he claimed, “promulgated like Papal bulls.”

Michel Déon - Galway’s adopted Frenchman

Literature Reviews Thu, Feb 02, 2017

IN THE late sixties, when a French author and revered member of the Academie Francaise, Michel Déon, came to County Galway with his wife Chantal, he probably had no idea he would spend the remainder of his life - spanning almost a half of a century - here, and that Galway was where he would pass away.

The vanished world of Cork’s Jews

Literature Reviews Thu, Sep 15, 2016

JEWTOWN, SIMON Lewis’s debut poetry collection, published by Connemara's Doire Press, tells the story of Cork’s Jewish community, from their arrival fleeing pogroms in 19th century Czarist Russia, to the closure of the last synagogue at South Terrace in February 2016.

'I’ll Tell You A Story': Johnny Magory in the Magical World

Literature Reviews Thu, Sep 01, 2016

THIS COMING September 13 would have marked Roald Dahl's 100th birthday. While there will be a great deal of talk with regards to his wonderful books, especially the children’s books, somehow his work for adults rarely gets a mention.

Book review: Little poems from Little John Nee

Literature Reviews Thu, Aug 04, 2016

HOW DO you take the work of a man of such great and varied talent as Little John Nee and distil it into a critique of 500 words? This man has busked with the Dice Man; became the iconic symbol of the early Galway Arts Festival parades; and was, for a period, Galway’s Pied Piper.

Red dresses, old toys, and date rape

Literature Reviews Thu, Aug 04, 2016

FALLING IN Love With Broken Things, Alvy Carragher's debut collection, is exceptional in one crucial respect; first collections are typically a gathering together of a poet's best work over the previous five or six years, so tend toward thematic looseness.

Book review: Poems of experience and war

Literature Reviews Thu, Jun 23, 2016

IT IS fashionable for reviewers, of the perpetually disappointed variety, to lodge Basil Fawlty style complaints against a poet’s first published collection.

Poetry of hammocks, wine, and gynaecologists

Literature Reviews Thu, Jun 16, 2016

A STRIKING feature of Marie Cadden’s debut poetry collection - Gynaecologist in the Jacuzzi – is that the voice speaking to us in the more than 50 poems included is, for a first collection, a peculiarly unified one.

Book review: The Lonely Sea and Sky

Literature Reviews Thu, Jun 09, 2016

DERMOT BOLGER has been one of the central movers on the Irish Literary landscape since the early 1970s. Founder of the Raven Arts, now New Island Press, he published Paul Durcan’s first book and created a publishing platform for a generation of Irish poets.

The achievement of Jessie Lendennie

Literature Reviews Thu, May 26, 2016

THERE IS a memory, somewhat hazy, probably romanticised, of the shop door opening one morning in the early eighties, and a young, statuesque, lady sailing in, wearing a flowing colourful cloak, somewhat reminiscent of an Adrienne Monnier or a Sylvia Beach.

Poet who uses swear words immaculately

Literature Reviews Thu, Mar 10, 2016

QUINCY LEHR is the sort of poet in whose favour I am absolutely biased. Lehr does not just know the facts of poetic and political history, he also appears – more than pretty much any other poet I know – to understand them.

Happy days for children

Literature Reviews Thu, Mar 10, 2016

"CHILDREN'S GREATEST enemies are adults," Roald Dahl stated at one point during his visit to Galway for a children’s festival in the late 1980s. “All they ever hear from them is 'Don’t do this, you can’t do that, be quiet, go to bed, do this, do that, do the other'. This was towards the end of the 'children should be seen and not heard' era.

The Famine - Gaeilge's Armageddon?

Literature Reviews Thu, Jan 07, 2016

THERE IS a popular perception that “The Great Hunger” of 1845 to 1849 was a one-off affair, a unique event, and that there are two totally different Irelands - the one before and the one after The Famine.

Poems to disturb your peace

Literature Reviews Thu, Jan 07, 2016

THERE ARE people, those with the better variety of accent, and PhDs mostly purchased for them their parents, who will use the fact that James O’Toole’s debut poetry collection, The Street, is self-published to try and dismiss it.

A story to make the Marquis de Sade twitch in his crypt

Literature Reviews Thu, Dec 17, 2015

THIS NEAR horror story of a novel contains a positive message which surely applies to most of us: however messed up your relationships are, or have been, even the most embarrassing catastrophe in the history of your love life was a paragon of balance and sanity compared to an average day in the life of most of the characters in this darkest of tales.

Once upon a child - children's books for Christmas

Literature Reviews Thu, Dec 03, 2015

DESPITE PUBLIC perceptions that fewer children are reading books, there has been a major increase in the publication of books for children in recent years. This is due in no small measure to the work of Children’s Books Ireland, and more especially Siobhán Parkinson.

John Behan: the people’s sculptor

Literature Reviews Thu, Nov 05, 2015

STARTING IN the early seventies and continuing for about 20 years, there was a continuous migration into Galway of extraordinary “blow ins” whose genius and drive transfigured the cultural life of the city.

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