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Blighted
The disease which arrived in Ireland in the 1840s did not attack humans, yet it led to the death of one million individuals. It was politics, not natural causes, which brought about this catastrophe. A grim twelve decades of consequence followed.
Eavan Boland 1944-2020
As editor and translator she contributed immensely to the cross-currents of poetic and intellectual exchanges between Ireland, the UK and the US. Her poetry encompasses a view and vision, precarious, troubled, yet also calm, which is also found in the numerous poets she celebrated.
Italian Diary VIII
And so on he goes, peddling ‘cures’ like some medieval travelling salesman. Let’s not forget the man who died in March in Arizona after consuming fish tank cleaner because Trump had claimed the chloroquine that was in it could be a ‘game-changer’. It was.
SF and violence: an exchange
John Swift argued in a review in the current issue of the drb that the IRA campaign was a failure. Philip McGarry disagrees, pointing to the current political prominence of Sinn Féin, which he sees as a clear outcome of its strategy of violence. John Swift responds.
A Timeless Fable
Albert Camus said that Kafka obliges us to read his books twice: once for the literal narrative, and twice for the figurative or allegorical. By that token, writes Ed Vulliamy, his own La Peste cannot be read less than thrice, for it spoke, and still speaks, on three levels: literal, allegorical and universal.
Friendly Enemies
Colum Kenny, author of a new study of Arthur Griffith, says Yeats was wrong about Lavery’s portrait of Sinn Féin’s founder, whom he described in a poem as staring with ‘hysterical pride’. When it came to personal pride, the poet indeed would have left many others standing.
Italian Diary VII
When somebody is the president, Donald Trump has said, the authority is total. Does he really believe this? As New York governor Andrew Cuomo reminded him: ‘The president doesn’t have total authority … We don’t have a king.’ But if he were a king, might he be Macbeth?
Recollections in Tranquillity
Today, April 7th, marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of the English poet William Wordsworth. He and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with their book of poems ‘Lyrical Ballads’, were instrumental in launching the Romantic period of English literature.
Italian Diary VI
‘Red Noses’, a play about the Black Death first performed in London in 1985, featured a team of players touring the plague-affected villages of 14th century France, offering an unusual remedy – ‘peacocks, not ravens, bright stars, not sad comets, red noses, not black death’.
Cast a Cold Eye
In 1948, at the request of WB Yeats’s widow, George, and with support from Maud Gonne MacBride, an Irish Navy vessel was dispatched to France to bring the body of the poet back for burial in Co Sligo. And there now it lies – or perhaps it may be the body of the Englishman Alfred Hollis.
Italian Diary V
The order in which we read news of recoveries or deaths in an article can change the tone, and consequently our mood. It is easy to be too upbeat but also to be the opposite. We are walking on very thin ice as Italy attempts to get through this emergency and eventually to exit from it.
WT*
‘Good authors too who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose,’ was Cole Porter’s observation on falling standards back in 1934. But while they may have written such words in their manuscripts, they still found it hard to get them past their editors.