Reviews
Christ Deliver Us!
The Sun-fish The Guardian
The Thing Is
Spindrift
On the Night Watch
Going By Water The Irish Times

Just Published
Christ Deliver Us! - Thomas Kilroy

Recently Published
Going by Water - Michael Coady
Only This Room - Kerry Hardie
The Sun-fish - Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Events
Gerald Dawe - Dublin
Seán Dunne Festival
Poetry Now Festival

Recent Remarks
Jim Nolan's citation

Special Editions
Wayside Shrines - Paul Muldoon
Somewhere the Wave Derek Mahon

Awards
Irish Times Poetry Now shortlist
T S Eliot Award - Winner
Trinity Alumni Awards
Brian Friel honoured

Regulars
Poem of the Month

Reprints
Faith Healer - Brian Friel
Collected Poems - Michael Hartnett
Lovers - Brian Friel

Other
RTE News
Gallery is 40
The Ten Best Poetry Books
Books of the Year 2009

 

RTE has announced that on Thursday, March 25th at 5pm Arts Tonight will be recording a special programme marking the 40th birthday of The Gallery Press, Ireland’s foremost poetry and drama publishers.

We will be joined by poets and writers including Vona Groarke, Michael Coady, Gerald Dawe, Thomas Kilroy, Medbh McGuckian, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Peter Sirr and Peter Fallon.

The programme will be recorded in front of a live studio audience and we’re inviting you all to join us.

If you are free between 5 and 6pm on Thursday, March 25th and you would like to be in the audience, please email us at artstonight@rte.ie

We look forward to seeing you all there.

The first Gallery book arrived on 6 February 1970.

Forty years later, four hundred books later, we look forward to celebrating the authors' achievements in conjunction with the country's leading literary festivals. Details will follow of Gallery events at Poetry Now, Dun Laoghaire (March), Cuírt, Galway (April) and the Dublin Writers' Festival (June).

      

Christ, Deliver Us, inspired by Spring Awakening (published in 1891 and first performed in 1906) transposes Frank Wedekind’s notorious ‘children’s tragedy’ from fin-de-siècle Germany to the equally repressive atmosphere of Ireland immediately after World War II.

In and around a Catholic Diocesan College and an Industrial School for ‘difficult’ boys Thomas Kilroy explores and exposes the uncertainties and frustrations of sexual blossoming, the pressures exerted by parents and teachers – in particular ordained teachers – who forfeit authority for power with its legacy of systematic bullying. As its characters respond to ‘whispers of hope and desires’ and an unquenchable wish to be free, this scathing drama, while hinting at the redeeming possibilities of love, asserts the extortionate price put on childhood by both Church and State.

Like his friend Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy has been a keystone of Irish theatre for more than half-a-century. He is also one of its most inventive, influential and valued artists.

Published on 16 February 2010 to coincide with its World Première at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

Order your copy here 

                    

  

Wayside Shrines by Paul Muldoon
with paintings and drawings by Keith Wilson 

Two new extended poems by one of the most exciting writers at work, enhanced by the understated and evocative art of one of Ireland’s finest young painters.

This handsome edition features pencil drawings and full colour reproductions of paintings by Keith Wilson 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.

Wayside Shrines is the fourth title in this greatly admired series. The Riverbank Field by Seamus Heaney (and Martin Gale) and Conversation in the Mountains by John Banville (and Donald Teskey) are out of print. A limited number of copies of Somewhere the Wave by Derek Mahon (and Bernadette Kiely) are still available.

40pp   ISBN: 978 1 85235 479 4 Hardback

Published: 24 September 2009

€100.00 each (plus post and packing)

Order your copy here 

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       

The same again, the old bell says — the roofs,
the pillowed heads, the dreams, the tides — the same
but not the same, this winter morning here.

In his beautifully conceived, meticulously assembled new collection, Michael Coady, laureate of the home place, ruminates on and records the traces left by our lives. From the ‘rhapsody of now’ through ‘words of love and grief, / the earth’s embrace, its constancy’ Going by Water celebrates enduring values and the mysterious triumphs of ordinary experience and everyday ritual. It recounts inherited as well as overheard and re-imagined stories. It ranges from the river traditions of his native town to take in a new Ireland and the newfound locales of Paris and beyond with their communities of the living and dead. While it sounds elegiac notes it pulses to the beat of music as a portal to transcendence.

Symphonic in its orchestration, integrating poetry, prose narratives and the author’s photography, Going by Water elicits from its catchment a universal human measure. With All Souls and One Another it forms a trilogy unique in our literature.

Published: November 2009

Order your copy here

The red dog shudders and rises and listens.
Uncertain light shines the grasses.
Wealth sits in inner rooms, staring.

These are our days . . .
                                                    — Humankind

In the Irish Times George Szirtes recognized the ‘unusual warmth’ in Kerry Hardie’s poems and their ‘great density and power of experience.’ Only This Room is her fifth collection. From the ‘headstrong ways’ of herring gulls that ‘threaten and swagger and strut’ and records of experiences in Paris and Spain to sequences attentive to the monastic life on Skellig Michael and in Kells Priory in County Kilkenny this book questions, celebrates and challenges. Ultimately it is concerned with the quiet realization that ‘there is nothing to do in the world except live in it.’

Published: 15 October 2009

Order your copy here

                           
In Ní Chuillenáin’s work the imagination is not a refuge, but the true site of authority, where something is always beginning.’
                                            — Sean O’Brien, The Sunday Times 

‘Images flex and crack with revelatory energy; crucially, however, they retain their translucence, electrifying . . . essential poetry.’
                                                     — Sarah Crown, The Guardian

The Sun-fish, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, reinforces  convictions that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s transforming and trans-porting ways of seeing are like no other: silk scarves fly at her face ‘like a car wash’; there’s the ‘whisper of a cashmere sleeve’, the nuns’ ‘leathery kiss’ and a lighthouse ‘scraping the sea with its beam’.

By now familiar motifs – waves, tides, dividing lines, arches and doorways, journeys, a high tower and water, water everywhere, reprise previous effects and reach forward into new domains. Poems about men and the men in her family, a ‘woman’s story and the stories of women’, elegies, homages and her family’s history, are developed through mist or the gap in a tale. Other poems tease out the tricks of light, at dawn or dusk, to open the lock of language.

The title sequence is both alluring and hypnotic. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry is one of the marvels of our time.

Published: 15 October 2009

Order your copy here

Faith Healer is now recognized as one of the masterpieces of Ireland’s greatest living playwright. In the course of four monologues the stories of a travelling healer, his wife, and his manager unfold. Brian Friel weaves their versions of the healer’s ‘performances’ and a terrible event into haunting, magnificent art.
  ‘Through their evasions, omissions, and confessions, Frank’s speeches chart the trajectory of his self-destruction . . . The story of his struggle to recapture his spiritual powers becomes, instead, the story of the loss of a soul . . .
   Frank’s wife, Grace, and his manager, Teddy, are the other witnesses to the healings — and to the price they all pay for his occasional miracles. In Friel’s brilliant storytelling, the refracted memories of the characters paint a harrowing picture of recrimination and self-aggrandizement.’
                                                         — John Lahr, The New Yorker

‘The tragedy for the characters in Faith Healer is that while connection among them is elusive, the memory of fleeting contact remains and scalds. That the same might be said of the play’s effect upon us is, more than anything, what makes Faith Healer a major work of art.’
                  — Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Order your copy here

Michael Hartnett’s death, at the age of 58, robbed poetry readers of one of Ireland’s beloved authors. His Collected Poems represents a body of work which is etched indelibly in contemporary literature.

His work is marked by a rare lyric grace, a humane perspective and delicacy of touch. This is a major Irish writer, the owner of a unique voice whose confidence and ingenuity are lifted by a quiet waywardnesss. As Seamus Heaney said, ‘He’s not like anybody else.’ This book richly demonstrates the truth of that observation.
                                                                       — Patricia Craig, TLS

A wonderful book of loves and sorrows by a writer who is wise to ‘the ways / of cities’ and ‘all the perversions of the soul . . . learnt on a small farm’. Lines tap into something ancient, darkly mythical and yet (they are) workaday. His is an extraordinary gift — there is much to learn from this Collected Poems.
                                                  — Michael A Kinsella, PN Review

Order your copy here

Lovers comprises two short complementary plays,
Winners and Losers.

In the first, the lovers are a young couple preparing for their final school exams and their imminent wedding. The girl is pregnant. Although they promise each other happiness, their deaths by drowning save them from a more likely destiny.
  In the second play, the lovers are older, but their passion, at first, is no less real. It is their mariage that brings its share of compromises and unhappiness. These plays combine to suggest the ‘fallible hopes and disenchantments of the varieties of love’ (D E S Maxwell). They have become perennial favourites with drama companies, teachers, students and audiences all over the world.

Order your copy here   
                                                                                                          

Click to see larger image

Congratulations to Philip Gross who has won the 2009 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry for The Water Table (Bloodaxe).

Shortlisted for the award were: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin The Sun-fish (Gallery Books); Fred D'Aguiar Continental Shelf (Carcanet); Jane Draycott Over (Carcanet); Sinéad Morrissey Through the Square Window (Carcanet); Sharon Olds One Secret Thing (Cape); Alice Oswald Weeds & Wild Flowers (Faber); Christopher Reid A Scattering (Areté); George Szirtes The Burning of the Books and Other Poems (Bloodaxe) and Hugo Williams West End Final (Faber).

The winner was announced at an award ceremony on Monday 18 January 2010.

This is the third year in a row in which a Gallery Book has been included on the shortlist.    

Peter Fallon has received one of Trinity College’s 2009 Alumni Awards. These awards recognize graduates who, in the eyes of the selection committee, have 'made a significant contribution to society and have brought great honour on their alma mater'. He was chosen as 'a richly deserving recipient for his outstanding achievement as a poet and in the world of publishing'.

The other awardees this year are Chris de Burgh, Mark Pollock and Louise Richardson.

William Trevor is the only other writer honoured in this way.    

 

Congratulations are due to Brian Friel who received the Ulysses Medal, UCD's highest honour at a ceremony on Bloomsday.
                           

At the same event Dennis O'Driscoll received an Honorary Doctorate of Literature.

                                                                  

   

Kilroy’s concern is how sexual awakening is corrupted by the shadow of physical abuse, where ignorance is enforced with beatings and budding desires can warp into something dangerous. It may count as a period drama, but its echoes are heard today.

  Like Wedekind, Kilroy takes great care neither to moralise nor demonise. Several of his priests may be tyrants and hypocrites, but . . . offer shadows of tolerance and charity. It is the culture that is contaminated, where parental figures sway between fretfulness, lenience and inflexible authoritarianism.

  Kilroy’s last moments mark his sharpest deviations from Wedekind. Reconciling sex, spirituality and self-determination, and defining them away from institutional corruption, his compassion speaks directly to today, delivering us from cynicism and hopelessness with a notably secular prayer.

— Peter Crawley, The Irish Times

Although she has long been famous in Ireland, it is perhaps only in the last 10 years or so that Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has begun to receive due recognition in Britain. Ní Chuilleanáin's work often eludes categories.
  At its most densely enigmatic — for example in 'The Clouds', 'The Water' and 'Where the Pale Flower Flashes and Disappears' — Ní Chuilleanáin's work is cousin to the bejewelled, mesmeric poems of Medbh McGuckian, though its dynamic and pacing are often more urgent. Sometimes, out of its flux, there emerges a sudden arresting authority.
  The effects of light on water offer an embarrassment of riches . . . the effect is one of awe . . . as Ní Chuilleanáin reapeatedly indicates, the world is certainly mysterious enough to be going on with.

— Sean O'Brien, The Guardian , 6 February 2010

Again an eclectic package of surprises, slipping from verse to prose and photograph with elegiac ease.
  There is much of tides and rain, fishers of salmon, weirs, bridges and millwheels turning and tragedies of lives lost. There is an astonishing prose piece, 'Talitha Cumi', about finding the body of a drowned child, after three days of searching, guided by a blessed candle fixed on a small cross bound to a sheaf of straw.
  . . . there is abundant humour . . . One poem . . . delights in a freeflow of jazz history at the graveside of the inventor of the saxopone.
  There are other considerations in this remarkable collection of a poet very much of his own place, a quiet player of a muted instrument not given to posturing from his music stand.

— Joe Kennedy, Sunday Independent, 17 January 2010

In this, her fifth collection, community is renounced for the solitude of the mystic.
   Hardie's heaven is pure serenity; in her opening poem, she admires the cold eyes of seagulls that 'call out to something inside me / that is empty and fearless and firece.'
  Always mindful of the pastoral calendar, Only This Room moves from harvest to mid-winter and the gathering of the dead . . . at home in her favoured haunts such as Ballinskelligs Bay, the 'luminous ground for this drifting, this talking' catches flame once again.

— Selina Guinness, The Irish Times, 1 January 2010

One of the great pleasures of reading Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin’s work comes from entering a world of such magnitude . . . Again and again, she manages to balance her highly developed set of emblems against the fragile, creaturely life she also honors.

Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems may often read like partially occluded narratives, but they also respond to political and social occasions. In her two most recent volumes, The Girl who Married the Reindeer from 2001, and The Sun-fish, which has just been released in Ireland, Ní Chuilleanáin presents social and naturalistic settings and imagery with higher resolution than in the past. The mystery remains, but it’s tempered more often now by social immediacy.

I love how effortlessly Ní Chuilleanáin collapses the usual divisions between intellect and imagination. (Her) tendency to counterpoint her enigmatic material with fuller narratives deepens in her newest volume, The Sun-fish. In 'On Lacking the Killer Instinct,' she writes of her father’s war experience. In 'The Polio Epidemic,' she delves into memories of her childhood in Cork City. The last poem in the book, 'The Copious Dark,' follows a woman whose nighttime city walks form a whole atmosphere of mind. And her personal impressions relate to her social urge, her desire to account for others.

Ní Chuilleanáin in her steady and increasing success return(s) us to human scale. Perhaps this is why the most impressive poems often feel so estranging. They show us how profoundly unknown, though not necessarily unknowable, our actual lives may be.

— Peter Campion, Poetry

 
It is Ní Chuilleanáin’s skill in negotiating what are, essentially, different realms (which is always the business of metaphor, and metaphor is her beautifully handled, or played, instrument) that always catches and holds my attention, and it is a skill on plain and continuous view in this latest volume (a Poetry Book Society recommendation). .  . ), she manages, as her best poems always manage, to embody mystery that’s been palpably encountered and, in a language of concrete presence, expressed.

Again and again, that is, she creates small, clear windows into a fully realized narrative world, . . . one charged all of a sudden by something we’d have to call visionary

The dominant impression is of poems that are, like the sun-fish themselves, “Suddenly present, a visitation” – all composed in a tone that is equal parts knowledge, wisdom, at times a quiet ferocity, and something like warm yet detached compassion.

Like other Ní Chuilleanáin volumes, this one resembles, with no hint of piety, a book of prayers – secular and sacred at once, and curiously consoling in their depths of spiritual reserve.

“How as a child she watched without moving,” she says in one poem. It is that patience married to that intensity, that utterly absorbed attention that drives these poems, poems that make Sun-Fish yet another indispensable Ní Chuilleanáin collection.

   — Eamon Grennan The Irish Times , 12 December 2009

The ‘Shhh’ poems are poems of globalization, with titles such as The New Regime Inherits the Electrodes and For the Hanged Boys . These pieces help us to put names on some contemporary sources of confusion. An even finer achievement is the sequence entitled ‘The Overgrown Path’, concerning the poet’s expectant wife, childbirth, and the early childhood of their daughter:

           . . . I look over and see, suddenly, how close you are,
           what gravid means, how we are walking slowly out of
                our old lives . . .

In the title poem:

           The thing is this: you hold them to the light
           and laugh, you bring them to me
           one in each fist like the edges of a cross . . .

A little girl plays with crayons under the shadow of a cross: the reader is touched by a quattrocento gust. Then:

           . . . the joy of it lifts you to your feet
           where you sway with possibility, conducting your colours
           and the thing is this, the thing is always this.

That such a celebration of children and creativity occurs just as our birth-rate begins to top the European statistics is one of the ways in which Sirr, MacNeice-like, captures our current reality. Speaking as a Dubliner, I can testify that reading this labour of love I came both to know Dublin better and to like her better.

— Philip McDonagh, The Irish Times, 21 November 2009

. . . The poems in Spindrift serve as a reminder that in the strongest poetry there's always the sound of someone confronting with courage and craft the outer and inner worlds of hazardous matter. What these poems possess are seriousness of purpose, clarity of intelligence, exactitudes of feeling and, most of all, a quiet mastery of language in its instrumental work as sound and cadence, as image, as metaphor, as just plain statement.

  Such qualities confirm Groarke's position as a leading figure among the most accomplished poets of her (very talented) generation.

  . . . in this, her strongest collection so far, she comes clear in a complex, satisfying, distinctive voice that is no one's but her own.

                — Eamon Grennan The Irish Times, 17 October 2009

Only last year, the Belfast poet Ciaran Carson published For All We Know, a book-length poem inviting readers to assemble from two enigmatic pieces the story of a relationship conducted in an atmosphere of danger and paranoia. With On the Night Watch he goes a stage further, daring another elaborate experiment recalling some kinds of minimalist verse (by Americans such as Robert Creeley) written in the 1950s.

There are three “movements”, adding up to 126 poems. Each has 14 lines (seven couplets) of rarely more than five syllables each, and the final line of every third example supplies the title of a subsequent poem. Thus, one that ends “We do not know/how all this//came to be/nor how we stand//dazzled in/this field of eyebright” recurs in the title This Field of Eyebright three pages later. There is no obvious plot line, only mysterious, elusive images, and the effect is never­theless riveting. “Eyebright” is one of various repeated words, and since eyebright is a medicinal herb there is an impression of an ­emergency medical context. With this sequence of tiny, haunting poems Carson — venturesome as ever — may be wanting us less to read in the conventional sense than “to watch//what never seems/to alter” as you run frame after frame of a film reel through your fingers.

— Alan Brownjohn The Sunday Times, 19 July 2009
                                                                                                       

. . . In christening Michael Coady The Bard of Carrick there is a danger of doing his art a great disservice. Firstly, at a prosaic level, because in common with much of the work in his previous books, many of the poems and stories collected here have emerged from his travels beyond the frontiers of Carrick. In particular, his extended stays at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris as well as several expeditions to Newfoundland and the USA have been a source of great inspiration and yielded a bountiful harvest of poetry and prose.  Secondly — and much more important — Michael has always been faithful to that fundamental credo: the story of my own place is the story of the world. In chronicling the comings and the goings — literal and metaphorical — of this small valley, the marks Michael Coady puts on these pages describe universal truths precisely because they exist first and foremost as local and particular ones.

In Going By Water, Michael returns again and again to his enduring themes. Collectively, the poems, prose pieces and photographs amount to an unflinching, compassionate and ultimately celebratory meditation on the transient nature of all human experience. In this book, as in all of Michael’s work, the town clock is forever ticking, the river flows relentlessly towards the sea and our collective short journey from womb to tomb is often measured against the relative permanence of the elements. But if we hardly need to be reminded of our mortality, we may need Michael Coady’s reassurance that death, when it strikes, is no more or less than a part of the great circular dance. That assurance has been hard earned and is given repeatedly and eloquently in the pages of this book. We are further consoled and often uplifted by a series of magnificent poems and stories sprinkled throughout the book, where the writer journeys beyond the grave and performs the ultimate creative act of resurrection. These expeditions of recovery are at once unbearably poignant and incredibly joyful to witness. The young and the elderly, strangers, friends and family. Young lovers on a Paris street, A traveller mother and child, his Uncle Peter’s dance band, the great boatman, Willmo Callaghan on his final journey upriver — and in one extraordinary imagining, where we are invited to see again as the children they once were, the entire population of the cemetery at Montparnasse.  All these disparate and often desperate souls, through Michael’s ferocious and generous acts of the imagination, called back from the dead and immortalised now between these covers.

And as if that were not enough . . . The real question, it seems to me, is not what happens at the hour of our death or afterwards — but what do we do while we’re waiting. Well, if what Master Coady bears witness to is to be credited, what you do is you live — and live abundantly. Going by Water is a defiant affirmation of what Michael’s publisher, the irrepressible Peter Fallon, refers to on the dust cover of this beautiful book as “the mysterious triumphs of ordinary experience and everyday ritual.” As all of us know, Michael’s life has been deeply enriched by music and he finds ample time here to give thanks for that blessing. More than this, his life has been touched by his ability to capture the ordinary extraordinary and between these covers are a suite of poems and prose pieces which, through language, character and story amount to a shout of joy, to a way of living and to a song of praise. June Impromptu, The Scales of the Salmon, The Inside Out Beckett Umbrella, The Friday Rounds, Sheela na Gig, O Wonderful World of Ironmonger . . . even the titles combine to make music, just as all of the poems and prose and photographs combine to make of this book a symphonic masterpiece — at least until the next one!

— from remarks by Jim Nolan, Playwright,
at the launch of Going by Water
22 November 2009

 

January/February's Poem of the Month.

To view this month's poem by Derek Mahon click on this link.

                                                                                                    

    

The Independent (London) - 21 April 2009
The Ten Best Poetry Books

Ciaran Carson: Collected Poems
'The masterly Belfast poet spins yarns from history's battlefield from Dresden to Crossmaglen, rich in everyday human detail.'

www.independent.co.uk

Order your copy here
                                                                                               

 

The Irish Times

Laments
The Laments of 16th-century Polish poet Jan Kochanowski has been reissued with a new preface by translator Seamus Heaney (Gallery Press). These impassioned, poised poems recount the grief of a father at his two-year-old daughter's death. That they retain their power to move a reader across four centuries speaks of the accomplishment of the well-made, sincere poem.

Arts Building
Trinity College
Dublin 2

Tues
16 March

7.30pm

Gerald Dawe reading and talk:
"'Burned Countryside': landscapes of Irish war poetry"

This year's festival features poetry readings, a literary breakfast, comedy, workshops, sports writing, debate and performance poetry with jazz.   Contributors include Conor O'Callaghan, Tom Paulin, Michael Coady, Michael Kelly, Eamonn Carr, Anthony Healy, and A L Kennedy.

www.seandunne.ie

Pavilion Theatre
Marine Road
Dun Laoghaire
Co Dublin

Thurs-Sun
25-28 Mar

The 15th annual Irish Times Poetry Now Festival programme includes readings by Justin Quinn, Philip Gross, Derek Mahon, Rosanna Warren, Vona Groarke, Paul Muldoon, John Burnside and John F. Deane.

Full programme details can be downloaded from  www.poetrynow.ie