Read Ireland Book News - Issue 64 - New Irish Poetry
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Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 by Seamus Heaney (Paperback; 15.35 IRP / 22.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
This volume comes as close to being a 'Collected Poems' as its author cares to make. It replaces his New Selected Poems 1966-1987, giving a fuller selection from each of the volumes represented there and adding large parts of those that have appeared since, together with examples of his work as a translator. The book concludes with 'Crediting Poetry', the speech with which Seamus Heaney accepted the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to him, in the words of the Swedish Academy of Letters, for his 'works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth.'
Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge (Paperback; 6.99 IRP / 11.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
The poetry of Francis Ledwidge evokes an Ireland of traditional nostalgia. But Seamus Heaney has said of Ledwidge that his fate was more complex and more modern; his moral courage alone gave him 'membership in the company of the walking wounded, wherever they are to be found at any given time.' Born the son of a migrant farm labourer in 1887, Ledwidge claimed the nobel heritage of the dispossessed Irish peasantry. While he wrote ardently of nature and the pastoral grandeur of his native County Meath, his short life - as a local political representative, an activist of the Irish Volunteers - was a testimony to passionate convictions on human rights. And though he is best know for his moving tribute to Thomas MacDonagh, Ledwidge himself was finghting in France during the 1916 Uprising. He was killed in action in 1917, an Irish poet who richly deserves a place in the ranks of his WWI counterparts Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and Sirgfried Sassoon.
The Lost Land by Eavan Boland (Paperback; 9.50 IRP / 14.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
This new book, the first since the poet's Collected Poems, is in two parts. The opening sequence entitled 'Colony' explores the theme of Irish language and culture. This is followed by a collection of individual poems which open out from autobiography into a sense of larger belonging. 'The Lost Land' of the title, the poet says, is 'not exactly a country and not entirely a state of mind … the lost land is not a place that can be subdivided into history, or love, or memory. It is the poet's own, single, and private account of the ghostly territory where so much human experience comes to be stored.'
The Alexandrine Plan by Ciaran Carson (Paperback; 7.95 IRP / 11.95 USD) [Add To Basket]
In 34 sonnets, the poet animates the romantic agony of three of Europe's greatest 19th century poets with characteristic humour, argot and brilliant rhymes. Their formal patterns harness the forward rush of his thought and language. His 'correspondences' in this book show these poets' relevance to late 20th century Ireland.
Taking My Letters Back: New and Selected Poems by Dermot Bolger (Paperback; 6.99 IRP / 9.99 USD) [Add To Basket]
Although one of Ireland's best-known novelists and playwrights, Dermot Bolger has always been first and foremost a poet. This long overdue collection combines the best of his early work along with new poems written over the past decade and never before collected in book form. With this collection, the reader can see the span of the poet's lyric sensibility over nearly twenty years.
Shelmailer by Medbh McGuckian (Paperback; 7.95 IRP / 11.99 USD) [Add To Basket]
In this ambitious collection, elegies and laments for presentday disturbances fit a previous whirlwind moment, the insurgence of United Irishmen in 1798. Five sections accommodate insistent voices of ghosts from the past, the Rising itself, the quelling of that rebellion through executions and incarcerations, and violent losses. A number of shorter poems add energy and urgency to the book's growing awareness of the fact of a buried tragedy. Ultimately, this is a book of consoling art and lasting meaning, at once a memorial and an example of our time.
Hay by Paul Muldoon (Paperback; 9.50 IRP / 14.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
Paul Muldoon's new collection refines, and redefines, a lyrical strain in which an ostensible lightness of touch still has the strength to bear the weightiest subject matter. At once conventional and cutting-edge, beautiful and bleak, this is a book sure to win even more admirers for this much-laurelled Irish wonder-poet. His previous collection , The Annals of Chile, won the T. S. Eliot prize for the best book of poems of 1994 and this new book is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
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