Issue 90, June 2017
In This Issue
The Return
After a life lived mainly ‘elsewhere than in Ireland’, Harry Clifton returned to live in Portobello, near his boyhood home. The return brings with it some foreboding: will the past and its ghosts rush forward to embrace him? Mind you, he’s not the only one who is out of place.
Innocent Abroad
Alan McMonagle’s debut novel has been compared to McCabe’s ‘The Butcher Boy’ and Ryan’s ‘The Spinning Heart’. He has nothing to fear from the comparisons. This is an assured and poised, hilarious and poignant work, both clever and touching, a tour de force.
The Power of Nine
Paula Meehan’s discovery of countercultural influences has long been a strategy of her poetic process, and the idea of divination is the holding pattern for this collection. The first poems are love songs to the moon and sea, the last to a sense of home, on an Aegean island, Ikaria.
Ars Poetica
Louise C Callaghan’s welcome new collection is shaped as a quartet, with the parts sharing core themes. The first treats of a Dublin childhood; the second features tributes to other admired poets; the third evokes the Aran Islands and the fourth the painter – and man – Francisco Goya.
Tales of Wonder
What we call fairytales rarely feature fairies, but they recount, in a rich code of metaphors and symbols, the journey of human beings from childhood to adulthood. They are simple and profound, in structure elementary and unfussy, in ideas basic and universal, in style beautiful and attractive.
Desperately Seeking Focus
An exhibition that confuses painting with reportage does not make for great art. History painting is not and was never meant to be reportage. Rather its aims were to instil feelings of reverence for the heroes of the past and pride in the stories that shape a nation’s identity.
Lost on Leeside
The hero of Lisa McInerney’s ‘The Glorious Heresies’ is back in her second novel, ‘The Blood Miracles’. Ryan Cusack, now pushing twenty-one, has just come out of hospital confused and depressed. He has been offered a rebirth of sorts but new beginnings are not easy.
Sharing the Island
In the difficult and protracted Cypriot peace talks both sides need to take a cooler and more imaginative look at what they have chosen to remember, and, most importantly, what they have chosen to forget. Each in fact has much to regret as well as to commemorate in their common history.
A Century in Print
Toby Barnard’s quirky and often humorous study of Irish publishing in the eighteenth century contains an immense quantity of information gleaned from a huge variety of sources, all woven into a single colourful tapestry. It is the richest work on the subject ever accomplished.
A Servant of the Crown
When old age pensions were introduced in 1908 there was a fear among senior administrators in Ireland that they would be massively abused by ‘a class of people who have brought scheming for the purposes of obtaining state and charitable aid to a pitch of perfection’.
Reading the Revolution
A plethora of new books has appeared this year, accompanied by a number of exhibitions, in response to the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the remarkable political energies it released worldwide throughout the twentieth century and its still contested historical legacy.
Before Babel
Nineteenth century linguistic scholarship led to the identification of a language family designated as ‘Indo-European’. The demonstration that ancient Western languages such as Latin or Greek were related to similar Eastern languages permitted the hypothesis of a common mother language.
Faith of Our Fathers
A history of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland written by a non-believer gives a broadly sympathetic view, through a fast-paced narrative that begins with the Reformation and continues until the twenty-first century, full of clear-eyed judgments about a cast of heroes and villains.
The Business of America
A history of US capitalism and its dealings with governments suggests that Americans have a love-hate relationship with their business elites. It also suggests that the power of business has ebbed and flowed over time in response to popular demands to tame its excesses.
Sonic Reinventions
In the collection Alive, Elizabeth Willis proves herself a lyric poet, a pastoral poet, a prose poet, an historical poet, a political poet, a ‘language’ poet, a post-modern sonneteer, a list-maker, an ironic prankster, a confessionalist, and a minimalist, at least.