| Book Launch- 12th June 2008 |
| Homage to Gaia — Derek Mahon |
|
Homage to Gaia - newer poems
by Derek Mahon
with drawings by Hammond Journeaux
Limited edition. Handsewn wrappers.
Signed by the author.
Published: 12 June 2008
Sorry - oversubscribed and no longer available
|
| Conversation in the Mountains — John Banville |
|
Conversation in the Mountains - a play for radio
by John Banville
with paintings and drawings by Donald Teskey
A play for radio. In the summer of 1967 the Jewish poet Paul Celan accepted an invitation from Martin Heidegger, a Nazi Party member, to visit him in the Black Forest, hoping perhaps for a word of apology. What was said that day nobody knows . . .
This handsome edition features charcoal drawings and full colour reproductions of watercolours by Donald Teskey specially created in response to this work.
400 copies are numbered and signed by the author. 350 copies only are for sale. Printed on Rives Artist and hardbound in linen with blind embossed title and in a Pergamenata wraparound.
Conversation in the Mountains is the third title in our new, and greatly admired, series. The first, The Riverbank Field by Seamus Heaney (and Martin Gale), is out of print. Copies of the more recent Somewhere the Wave by Derek Mahon (and Bernadette Kiely) are still available.
64pp ISBN: 978 1 85235 443 5 Hardback
Published: April 2008
€100.00 each (plus post and packing)
Order your copy here
|
| Somewhere the Wave — Derek Mahon |
|
Somewhere the Wave - new poems by Derek Mahon
with drawings and watercolours by Bernadette Kiely.
Ten new poems – one of Derek Mahon’s ‘interim’ collections – conjure the world of Coleridge’s life, Brian Moore’s Belfast and the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov. They range from Italy to Goa to the American South. With the formal art of a master, they are sure to delight the author’s admirers.
This handsome edition features pencil drawings and full colour reproductions of watercolours by Bernadette Kiely specially created in response to this new work.
500 copies are numbered and signed by the author. 450 copies only are for sale. Printed on Rives Artist and hardbound in linen with blind embossed title and in a Pergamenata wraparound.
Somewhere the Wave is the second title in a new series. The first, The Riverbank Field by Seamus Heaney (and Martin Gale), was oversubscribed on publication. An instant collectors' item.
36pp ISBN: 978 1 85235 434 3 Hardback
Published: November 2007
€100.00 each (plus post and packing)
Order your copy here
|
| Venetian Epigrams — Seán Lysaght |
|
George Eliot called Goethe (1749-1832) ‘Germany’s greatest man of letters . . . and the last true polymath to walk the earth’. His Venetian Epigrams, largely composed between 31 March and 21 May 1790, provide — as Seán Lysaght notes in his introduction to these new translations — ‘insights into the erotic and intellectual world of the commanding figure of Germany’s classical age’.
Many of these witty observations — few of the hundred-and-fifty-eight exceed six lines — were suppressed for their ‘controversial’ content; some were destroyed. Pronouncements on the recent French Revolution, on politics, art, religion, sex and the street life of Venice, appear beside tender feelings for the poet’s lover and infant at home in Weimar.
The present translation is the first appearance of the complete series as a separate publication in English. Seán Lysaght’s injection of rhyme to the originals and his reprise of their idiomatic manner fuse an apparently insouciant touch with appropriate drive and panache.
Publication Date: 12 June 2008
Order your copy here
|
| Points West — Gerald Dawe |
|
‘A poet whose international outlook continually illuminates themes of home and origins, whose sensitivity to the vicissitudes of history sustains his intimations of solidarity, whose respect for the everyday ensures that its wonders are not taken for granted. And its soft-spoken tones, light-filled settings, delicate imagery and intimate occasions combine to produce poems which are as genial as they are accessible.’
— George O’Brien
Gerald Dawe’s seventh collection spans the globe, from Belfast to Boston and Berlin, from a Mediterranean island to his home in County Dublin, and from the irretrievable past, full of half-remembered things and distant echoes, to fugitive voices caught up in the turbulent beginnings of the twenty-first century. Points West is a book of emotionally forceful meditative poems — their plain style and direct expression by now an unmistakable signature.
Order your copy here
|
| At Least For a While — Pearse Hutchinson |
|
‘We should all live to be eighty,’ exclaims one of two brothers on a low stool at a high bar in the first poem in Pearse Hutchinson’s new collection.
At Least for a While is a book marked as much by simple pleasures and love for ‘the beautiful insulted land, and people’ as by its outraged response to the greedy god, Mammon.
In a book of admirations and characteristic sympathy there are poems which chronicle experiences in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Milan, Lisbon and Seville. Closer to home the poet enjoys the sight of dandelions in all their glory and the immaculate flight of a magpie. His journeys into memory, and his re-examination of it, range from reflections on a generous painter and other encounters with art to moments of grief and near-perfection.
Now at eighty-one Pearse Hutchinson is composing poems remarkable for their flair, vigour and bold authority.
Order your copy here
|
| Selected Poems — Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin |
|
The patient, unhurried assembly of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s first collection resulted in an uncommonly accomplished debut. Poems from Acts and Monuments (1972) have already revealed their lasting power. In this timely retrospective they join generous selections from each of her subsequent books down to The Girl who Married the Reindeer (2001). In the words of Ruth Padel (Financial Times) ‘Her eerie blend of the legendary and modern sounds utterly natural. A new book from her is a major event.’
‘There is something second sighted, as it were, about Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s work, by which I don’t mean that she has any prophetic afflatus, more that her poems see things anew, in a rinsed and dreamstruck light. They are at once as plain as an anecdote told on the doorstep and as haunting as a soothsayer’s greetings.’
— Seamus Heaney
Order your copy here
|
| Lament for Art O'Leary — Vona Groarke |
|
In his inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, Peter Levi famously described it as `the greatest poem written in these islands in the whole eighteenth century'. Now, with a new version of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's lament for her husband, a victim of Penal Laws and personal grudge, Vona Groarke joins a list of diverse writers who have translated all or part of it, from Frank O'Connor and Eilís Dillon to Thomas Kinsella and Paul Muldoon.
This version renews the passionate rage and desire of a pregnant widow for her flamboyant husband, shot down while riding his famed brown mare on 4 May 1773. Revisiting the Irish tradition of the funeral lament or 'keen', this poem's vigour and sincerity speak beautifully both of its time and place, and to our own. The enlightening introduction elaborates the context of `the meeting point of a cultured imagination and a cultural inheritance'.
Alison Brackenbury has written of being `seduced by the haunting, time-defying poems of Vona Groarke' — qualities Vona Groarke, one of the outstanding poets of her generation, brings now to bear on this iconic poem.
Order your copy here
|
| The Sphere of Birds — Ciaran Berry |
|
From ‘the blood that’s bloomed above the wound’s neat hole’ to ‘harsher truths that hit home hour after hour’ Ciaran Berry fixes his unflinching stare on an astounding range of subjects – ‘foundlings’ out of history’s long corridor, Donegal fences, Belfast in the War years, immigrant workers from Ireland, a rogue elephant in Coney Island (1903), a high-wire walker, and the beekeeper’s art. From the fact of blindness to the act of seeing there is a surgical precision to his descriptions and reports. By way of the circuits of his meditations, curiosity and learning lead to the realm of discovery and elucidate often arcane mysteries. Sure-footed and steady paced this first collection reveals an uncommon capacity to sustain tension over long lines and, even, extended poems. The Sphere of Birds is a remarkably impressive, eclectic and accomplished debut.
Order your copy here
|
| For All We Know — Ciaran Carson |
|
‘a remarkable work, richly detailed, subtle, intricate and moving’
– PBS Choice citation
Shortly after a man and a woman meet for the first time in a second-hand clothes shop in Belfast, a bomb goes off. It is some time in the 1970s. They become lovers. For All We Know is their story, told in the recent past: a meditation on love, place, memory, loss and language, how people know each other, misunderstand each other, or translate each other, not to mention the events and circumstances which are beyond their control.
Gesturing towards a conventional sonnet sequence – the poems consist of fourteen lines, or multiples thereof, in lines of fourteen syllables – Ciaran Carson’s novelistic book also references film noir, Cold War thriller, fairy story, and the art of the fugue. In its uncanny music, repercussions and reprises, its mysterious unfolding of what happened or what might have been in Paris and Dresden (or was it Berlin?), For All We Know is a sequence of poems like nothing you’ve ever read before.
Published: 14 March 2008
Order your copy here
|
| Three Sisters - Brian Friel after Anton Chekhov |
| Irish Times Poetry Now 2008 Award - Shortlist |
|
The shortlist for the 2008 Irish Times Poetry Now Award has been announced. The five selected titles are: Secular Eden - Paris Notebooks 1994-2004 by Harry Clifton, Out of Breath by Eamon Grennan; Reality Check by Dennis O'Driscoll, Black Moon by Matthew Sweeney and The Boy in the Ring, by Dave Lordan.
|
| Irish PEN/AT Cross Literary Award |
|
The 2008 Irish PEN/AT Cross Literary Award has been awarded to Thomas Kilroy in recognition of a lifetime of literary achievement.
|
| Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize 2008 |
|
The 2008 Vincent Buckley biennial Poetry Prize has been awarded to David Wheatley who will visit Melbourne and be an honorary fellow at the Australian Centre.
David recently published a pamphlet with Rack Press called Lament for Ali Farka Touré.
|
| Poetry Book Society Choice |
| For All We Know- Ciaran Carson |
|
Ciaran Carson's new collection offers us love poetry as elegant and mysterious as its heroine, Francophine Nina . . . It is also an intricately-worked psychological and political thriller, where bombs in the streets of 1970s Belfast echo the fire-bombing of Dresden. Like his award-winning 2003 collection, Breaking News, which addressed the Crimea, Carson's For All We Know locates the Troubles within the wider Euorpean theatre of war.
This is a marvellously shifty book, in which every narrative may be a lie . . . Carson's formal conceits are the ver opposite of arid. . . . Each would be resonant by itself; together they create a strategy, not illustrating this shadowy story but instead deepening and complicating it.
For All We Know is rich with mystery, wise to the shadows events and possibilities cast on each other; . . . It would be unfair to give away the ending. But Carson's resolution is satisfying and necessary even as it throws us back on ourselves, and on big human questions about time, identity and the 'Forest of Language'. That it does so at the same time as performing the elegant footwork of fugal self-reference, and in a music which resonates still more profoundly at each reading, makes this touching, masterly book unique. If there is a canon, For All We Know will surely enter it.
— Fiona Sampson, Poetry Review
|
| The Fifty Minute Mermaid - Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill translated by Paul Muldoon |
|
Work of the currently best know Irish-language poet, with English translations on facing pages by one of the best known poets in any language or country. Such parallel translations of course give readers an idea of the richness and texture of the less familiar language — of how equivalences may be found — and convey also something of the poetics of both the original and the translator. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill creates a fantastic world of eerie seascapes, mysterious mermaids, mythical landscapes and magic. The poetry owes much to the magic realism of Spanish writers but there is a vein of hard reality running through the poems like Na Murúcha agus Galair Thógálacha (Merfolk and Infectious Diseases). A fascinating collection from two artists in their full maturity.
— Books Ireland, December 2007
|
|
Derek Mahon's writings are pervaded throughout, and to an unusual degree, by poetic intelligence. Some might feel that there is intellect rather than intelligence in the often dense allusiveness of his later poetry, but they would be wrong. Mahon finds a home, not just a reference library, in the Western poetic tradition which he knows so well. He feels it as much as he thinks about it. His translations reflect a keen awareness of what verbal art is. The details that constitute poetic success do not pass him by, because he has judgement and knows himself. He has dissected his mind and examined every nerve.
Still, his new book is called Adaptations . . . It is a way of putting Lowell into our heads . . . A book on a level with Imitations does not turn up every day. Adaptations is such a book.
— Martin Dodsworth, Agenda
Harbour Lights, a treasure trove of sensory perception, intelligence, verbal invention, moral discernment, and wit, plus highly readable access to pleasure and happiness.
— Alfred Corn, Contemporary Poetry Review
|
| |
|
The Gallery Press should, by the way, be congratulated on the handsome production of this (Harbour Lights) and other books on their list.
— Alfred Corn, Contemporary Poetry Review
. . . the valiant Gallery Press . . .
— Martin Dodsworth, Agenda
|
|
Most Irish poetry publishers conciously or otherwise model their books on Gallery's, and a few get close to their good looks, if not to their quality.
— Books Ireland, October 2007
|
|
Recently published was Peter Fallon's Ballynahinch Postcards (Ballynahinch Castle, Recess, County Galway in association with Occasional Press).
email: patrick@bhinch.iol.ie for futher information or to order.
|
| Three Sisters - Abbey Theatre Production |
The Hayloft
(Upstairs at The Long Valley)
Winthrop Street
Cork
|
|
The night begins with an open-mic Poetry Challenge, followed by guest reader, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.
Admission: free
T: 085 712 6299
www.obheal.ie
|
| Ledbury Poetry Festival 4-13 July |
| West Cork Literary Festival 7-11 July |
Sea Sky Shore Gallery
James Street
Westport
County Mayo
|
|
Book launch and reading to celebrate the publication of Seán Lysaght's Venetian Epigrams.
|
Glenties
County Donegal
|
|
The theme of the 28th MacGill Summer School, is:
A Feast of Friel
The Life and Works of Brian Friel - The MacGill School will bring to Glenties writers, theatre directors, actors and leading academics to discuss with the public the distinguished canon of Friel's work.
www.patrickmacgill.com
|
| Heaney Centre - Summer School |
Seamus Heaney Centre
Queen's University
Belfast
Northern Ireland
|
Mon -Fri
28 July -
1 August
|
Sessions by Ciaran Carson, Gerald Dawe, Leontia Flynn, Eamonn Hughes, Ed Larrissy, Medbh McGuckian, Sineád Morrissey , Glenn Patterson and Ian Sansom.
The Summer School is open to anyone aged 18 and above.
Tel: +44 (0)28 9097 3320 or +44 (0)28 9097 3422
Email: english@qub.ac.uk
|
Oldcastle Library
Oldcastle
County Meath
|
|
Literary Evening with Peter Fallon and Thabi Madide. (In association with Meath County Council Libraries).
Admission free. All welcome.
Further information www.lecheile.com
|
| William Carleton Summer School |
Corick House Hotel
Clogher
County Tyrone
|
|
Reading - Gerald Dawe
For further information contact
Killymaddy Tourist Information Centre
Tel. 028 87767259 or
Email: killymaddy@freeuk.com
|
|
