Stepping Into The Light
Sinéad Gleeson is already known as a generous literary critic and anthologist, who has rescued the work of some shamefully neglected writers and whose perceptive author interviews are celebrations of the imagination. Now she has stepped out to shine with a luminosity all her own.
Then Again, Pat Boran
In a poem about O’Connell Street’s Spire, the monument becomes a dagger, a skewer, an extended middle finger. None of the names are inclusive of us, the citizens; the Spire is the ‘we’ reduced to ‘I’, which might be seen as the opposite of Boran’s project, to expand the ‘I’ to ‘we’.
Stranger Danger
Stoker’s Count Dracula and Joyce’s Lipoti Virag are both dangerous intruders, the former threatening to infect the English with vampirism, the latter subverting the Irish moral order. Both writers were engaging with a contemporary worry about Eastern European immigration.
#MeToo is Nothing New
James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, published nearly a century ago, featured the themes of sexual harassment, both in Leopold Bloom’s possible relationship with the servant Mary Driscoll and in Molly’s adultery with Blazes Boylan, which seems more motivated by his power over her career than affection.
Loving and Losing
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne has written a moving memoir of her affair and subsequent marriage with the Swedish folklorist Bo Almqvist, who died in 2013. Life with a divorced man old enough to be her father might not have been the story she would have written for herself, but it led to a long and happy marriage.
A Little More Than Religion
Catholic and Protestant are routinely employed in Northern Ireland as labels denoting ethno-nationalist divisions which date back centuries. But the divisions have little enough to do with theology, deriving more from distinct relations to land, power and political legitimacy.
A Marlowe from Mayo
In the rural Ireland of the 1920s memories of the War of Independence and Civil War are still strong. The Garda Síochána stands at the forefront of efforts to normalise life in a traumatised society, yet they too, both as individuals and as a force, have problems winning trust.
The Deep Music of the World
Michelle O’Sullivan’s three collections, but especially this new one, will convince many that her work should find its way to attentive readers, who it is hoped will not try to fit her into any boxes other than the big one marked ‘poets’, who will appreciate her skill with language and her alertness to the world’s music.
Active Recovery
We first meet the author when he is twenty-eight, an aspiring writer resigned to suffering a bout of depression every summer since his mother’s death nine years earlier. He is diagnosed as bipolar but is reluctant to accept this, a position in which he is encouraged by a therapist.
With Proust Down Memory Lane
Ciaran Berry’s ability to move mercurially between simplicity and complexity, between a soufflé-light surface and deeper levels redolent of the rich complexity of a figgy pudding, makes his verse amenable as well as substantial.