Read Ireland Book News - Issue 77 - Poetry & Drama
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Seamus Heaney by Helen Vendler (Hardback; 15.99 IRP / 23.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Seamus Heaney has dealt unflinchingly with the relationship between the personal and political, the aesthetic and the ethical, over four decades, in work firmly rooted in both the English and the Irish literary traditions. His receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 was fitting recognition of his poetic achievements. In this beautifully written, accessible account of the life and work of Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler traces his development as a poet from 1966 onwards, pausing to look closely both at individual poems and at Heaney's political and literary heritage. One of the most acclaimed critics of verse in the English-speaking world, Vendler brings to the reader a sense of Heaney's struggle to be both socially responsible and creatively free, whilst explaining 'as much to myself at to others, the power of his extraordinary poetry.'
What the Hammer by Dermot Healy (Paperback; 6.95 IRP / 10.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Dermot Healey's poems 'project an open, rugged humanity, celebratory of common life.' In his second collection he broadens his focus from his communal devotions to the quick of the natural world. Local speech patterns incorporate idiosyncratic observations and sometimes surreal incursions. In a book busy with life - 'Everything is on the go. Time is moving inland' - the poet registers sounds and silences inultimately peaceful ways.
Selected Poems by Michael Longley (Paperback; 9.10 IRP / 14.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Celebrated for his lyrical intensity, his metaphysical wit, his thematic and formal range, Michael Longley is widely regarded as one of the finest poets in these islands. His life in Northern Ireland has contributed to the complexity of a poetic universe in which love, friendship and aesthetics contend with war, death and violence. There are no hard and fast boundaries between Longley's love poetry, his nature poetry, his war poetry and his elegies. He looks to the poets of Greece and Rome, particularly Homer and Ovid, and the poets of the two world wars. His great ability, perhaps, had been to distil the large and difficult themes into highly concentrated forms. This book is the poet's own selection from thirty years of writing; it reveals the strength and coherence of an extraordinary body of work.
Portia Coughlan by Marina Carr (Paperback; 6.95 IRP / 10.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Haunted by the death, fifteen years previously, of her twin brother who keeps calling to her, Portia Coughlan has become, in turn, a ghostly figure. She lives with her husband, who she can't love, and her three children, whom she can't trust to care for herself. The drama of Portia's sexually charged relationships and her fierce exertion to sustain her independence grows and grows in Marina Carr's richly textured dialogue, beautiful lyrice soarings and visionary flights.
Our Lady of Sligo by Sebastian Barry (Paperback; 8.00 IRP / 12.00 USD) [Add To Basket]
In Jervis Street Hospital in Dublin, circa 1953, Mai O'Hara lies, attended by the young nursing Sister, and visited by the uneasy figure of her husband Jack, daughter Joanie and her dead father. Fuelled by alcohol, passion and despair it is the story of her flamboyant but destructive relationship with Jack, and the lost country of her childhood and unfulfilled expectations in the wake of Irish Independence and self-rule. Our Lady of Sligo was produced at the Royal National Theatre in a co-production with Out of Joint, directed by Max Stafford-Clark, in April 1998.
Bandanna by Paul Muldoon (Paperback; 9.00 IRP / 13.50 USD) [Add To Basket]
Following his highly praised Shining Brow in 1993, which was also written as an opera libretto for the American composer Daron Aric Hagen, Paul Muldoon's Bandanna takes us into very different territory. Its action is set in a small town on the Mexican border; it includes illegal immigrants and a corrupt law officer among its dramtic personae; but at its heart is an old-fashioned tale of sexual jealousy and murderous revenge. The drama is powered by a strong emotional thrust, most of it conveyed in the form of popular song, and leads to a shattering climax. Bandanna demonstrates yet again the ever-increasing range of this most versatile of poets.
Three Plays by Martin Lynch (Paperback; 5.75 IRP / 9.00 USD0 [Add To Basket]
Martin Lynch has been a significant figure in Irish drama since the late 1970s when They Are Taking Down the Barricades gave first expression to contemporary Belfast working-class life. Rooted among the political and imaginatve forces bearing upon and emerging from both northern communities, Lynch explored those forces with humour, anger and compassion. Having committed himself to the values of community-based drama, he wrote a string of popular successes throughout the 1980s. Marked by an accurate ear for dialogue and pungent wit, the plays chalked out a territory securely his own. Out of this commitment have also come three of the most important plays in the last 25 years from the north of Ireland - Dockers, The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty and Pictures of Tomorrow. Dockers is a boisterous recreation of working class life in Belfast's famed Sailortown district. Reminiscent of Dario Fo but rigorously placed in the sadness of real political conflict, The Iterrogation of Ambrose Fogarty is a most vivid, pointed and funny play dealing with the ironies and absurdities of police detention. In the character of Willie Lagan, Lynch created one of the memorable comic Ulster figures. With Pictures of Tomorrow, Lynch attempts to deal with the disilusion of left-wing ideals in the wake of the collapse of Communism, against the poignant backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict loaded with Irish resonances. These plays, available for the first time, confirm Lynch as a leading Irish playwright.
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