FROLICKING IN THE ETHER The Dead Zoo by Ciaran Berry The “personhood debate” is news that stays news, ready to be puzzled over with each slow birth and slow death. To the expectant mother, the creature kicking inside her, in its infinite strangeness and infinite potential, may seem more fully another person than the newborn infant, […]
Book of the Year 2013
It is good to see the publication by The Gallery Press of the late Dennis O’Driscoll’s The Outnumbered Poet, Critical and Autobiographical Essays. Known for his wide-ranging interest and encyclopaedic knowledge of the poetry scene, this posthumous collection will be widely welcomed as a companion to his earlier Troubled Thoughts, Majestic Dreams. This furthers a […]
‘a kind of Desert Island Discs’ John McAuliffe reviews Derek Mahon’s Echo’s Grove
Recycling preoccupations and obsessions Derek Mahon’s introduction to Echo’s Grove (Gallery, €22.50/ €13.90), his collected translations, describes how he looks for “affinities of idea, shape and atmosphere” between his work and the work of those he chooses to translate. As well as exhibiting his taste, this new book might be said, then, to recycle (a […]
Here Comes the Sun King!
Conor O’Callaghan’s The Sun King reviewed by Maria Johnston ‘A piece of garbage I had around’, John Lennon unceremoniously dubbed his ‘Sun King’, the second song of the ground-breaking medley or ‘song montage’ that closes the Beatles’ final, ‘end of the line’ album Abbey Road (1969). Making innovative use of recording studio technology to orchestrate existing ‘bits […]
“O’Callaghan’s best book to date…”
(Conor) “O’Callaghan’s best book to date…” High praise for The Sun King which includes the already cult-followed The Pearl Works in last Saturday’s Irish Times http://bit.ly/12VxYGN
Happy Hour Review
Happy Hour — Andrew Jamison Sad and wonderful tension between what is sublime and what is commonplace — an astonishment at this world, augmented by the sardonic awareness that astonishment is nothing new – permeates themes of transience in Andrew Jamison’ first collection, Happy Hour. Critics may find some of these poems hackneyed, but I believe […]
Kerry Hardie — Edinburgh Review
The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree Kerry Hardie’s newest collection is a dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality. Death is, of course, such a common theme in poetry that it’s difficult to find anything new to say about it, but Hardie succeeds, injecting into these poems her usual quiet originality. For […]
Mahon Unplugged
“[Selected Prose] is Mahon unplugged, meditating on all things that have mattered to him over the stretch of his writing life to date. The volume, under the discrete narrative of individual essays and reviews, merges into a composite picture of the poet himself and the world he imagines, as much as the one in which he […]
Alan Gillis’ “Wonderful Collection” Reviewed
“In this wonderful collection, [Here Comes the Night] Gillis’s audacious formal and linguistic virtuosity immerses the reader in a twofold world separated by an invisible screen, a two-way looking glass, through which the poet constantly navigates.” — Alexandra Tauvry, Tower Poetry Read the full review here.
Culture Northern Ireland Review/Interview
The Belfast poet on etymology, translations and his new collection of poems after the French master Arthur Rimbaud Between 1872 and 1875, a young French vagabond, perhaps under the influence of alcohol and opium, travelled between London, Paris and Belgium, writing poems that would reflect how he had ‘[made] himself a seer through a long, […]
