Thomas McCarthy writes: A poet and former director of Poetry Ireland, Theo Dorgan has already written a number of successful prose works, including ‘Voyage Home’, his marvellous logbook of an ocean voyage from Antigua to Kinsale on the seventy-foot schooner ‘Spirit of Crosshaven’.

Gerard Smyth writes: War poet. Love poet. Nature poet. Elegist. Witness to the ‘Troubles’ and what in one poem he calls ‘the stereophonic nightmare / Of the Shankill and the Falls’. Michael Longley had a superb capacity to invent variations on his themes, and each became intrinsic to his art. The sustaining element across his…

Fredric Jameson died on Sunday, September 22nd, a few weeks after the piece below was written. His death will be mourned, especially but not only on the left, by readers and critics far and near. For generations old and young, he was the old master, great artificer. Except for changed tenses and some few words,…

Kieran Murphy writes: How will you ever know someone else? The cask that houses their brain may be familiar to you, but their consciousness and preoccupations will always only be glimpsed. Their nuances, doubts, and ambitions will never be transparent. In 1986, when I was an intern at Jervis Street hospital in Dublin, Eoin O’Brien…