But I Live in Dublin
The Dublin Notebook, appearing as the seventh volume in OUP’s collected Hopkins, is an exemplary work of scholarship and from now any serious piece of writing about the last phase of Hopkins’s life will rely on and be grateful for the painstaking work of its two editors.
New Poems
These four new poems by Gerald Dawe are from Mickey Finn’s Air, to be published later this year by Gallery Press
Tell me about your Mother
Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s new novel portrays the challenge of being both mother and artist, its most interesting character an emotionally abusive alcoholic for whom motherhood has not been enough and who dares to suggest it is possible for a mother to feel ambivalence toward her child.
One City, Many Voices
A new collection confines itself to poems about the city of Dublin but does not lack breadth or variety, spanning the centuries, including outsider as well as insider perspectives, and placing the old in dialogue with the new.
Joyce’s Comic Strips
A well-drawn portrait of our greatest artist that recounts some of the adventures of his life and work might be just the thing to perk up the days and weeks beyond Bloomsday, when, as like as not, rain could well again be general over Ireland.
Plunkett’s City
Walks through Dublin’s streets and slums, and through the leafy avenues of the airy and salubrious suburb of Kingstown, punctuate James Plunkett’s Strumpet City, casting light on the social divisions of the city and the political tensions which, as the book opens in 1907, are just beginning to bubble up.
This Life a Long Disease
Some recent writers have strongly emphasised the morbidity of Jonathan Swift’s temper, but a new biography restores some balance, putting the Dean’s apparent savagery into the context of his century and equally emphasising his huge gifts and the glamour and intrigue of parts of his life.
Snap, Crackle and Pop
Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music is the latest evidence of the writer’s ability to create rich characters and stories in whichever historical context she chooses. But do the historical research and narrative brio sometimes come at the expense of deeper introspection for the novel’s characters and a more satisfying grappling with the human condition?
Girl Trouble
Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls was published in London in 1960 and almost immediately banned in Ireland. It has never since been out of print, its author has continued to publish successfully, to enjoy a high reputation internationally and to be translated into many European languages. And yet she is still not quite accepted by many in her native country.
Ulster Polyphony
Northern literature and culture, if it was seen to exist at all before the 1960s renaissance, tended to be blackened by a caricatural view of the wider culture, seen as ‘dour’. John Hewitt’s memoir of the 30s and 40s, however, shows that there were many and varied voices at work.