Read Ireland Book Review
Issue 178
Irish Art 1830-1990 by Brian Fallon
Paperback; 12.99 IEP / 15.50 USD / 11.00 UK / 16.50 EURO; Appletree Press, 208 pages, with colour and b/w photos throughout [Add To Basket]While Irish writers have achieved international prominence in the twentieth century, Irish artists have made relatively little impact abroad. Yet for over a century and a half, Ireland has continuously produced painters and sculptors of international stature. In this highly acclaimed study, the author traces the development of Irish art from its roots in the Romantic Movement through to the end of the twentieth century, and shows how it has reflected the growth of national self-consciousness and the evolution of Ireland culture.
Echoes of a Savage Land by Joe McGowan
Paperback; 12.99 IEP / 15.50 USD / 11.00 UK / 16.50 EURO; Mercier Press, 408 pages, with 2 b/w photo inserts [Add To Basket]The north-west of Ireland palpably tingles with poetry and folklore. It is a beautiful mythic terrain with bare Benbulben, that inverted hull of some titanic ship, acting as watch and ward. It inspired W.B. Yeats to write some of his best poetry. To do the area justice in words requires something of a talent of a poet, and in Joe McGowan it has found an apt laureate. His theme is the rugged life of the ordinary folk who carved an existence that has changed utterly in the last half-century. Beginning with the rituals observed on the Celtic festival of Samhain, he tells with love and humour the story of the life led by the common people, the customs they practiced and the stories they told, not alone in the heartlands of Donegal, Sligo, Fermanagh and Leitrim, but throughout Ireland. Long hours of recorded conversation augmented by meticulous archival research cast new light on ancient traditions and beliefs. This book is a magical discovery in the lost worlds and a way of life unchanged for centuries.
Lyn: A Story of Prostitution by Lyn Madden and June Levine
Paperback; 8.99 IEP / 11.00 USD / 7.50 UK / 11.50 EURO; Attic Press, 275 pages [Add To Basket]First published in 1987, this book has become a classic and remains as compelling and shocking as ever, providing a stark and horrifying insight into life 'on the game' in Dublin. Lyn Madded worked for twenty years as a prostitute, mostly in Dublin. Her career ended on the night she watched her lover and pimp, John Cullen, throw a fire bomb through the window of Dolores Lynch's home. Dolores, who had 'escaped' from prostitution some years previously, perished along with her elderly mother and aunt. That murder shocked Lyn out of her dependence on John and enabled her to summon up the courage necessary to denounce him to the police. She began writing this book while awaiting the trial at which John Cullen was sentenced to eighteen years in jail. It is a fascinating, devastating, and quite agonisingly touching book.
Gusty Spence by Roy Garland
Hardback; 24.20 IEP / 28.50 USD / 20.00 UK / 30.50 EURO; Blackstaff Press, 333 pages, with b/w photo insert [Add To Basket]Gutsy Spence, one of the most famous 'hard men' of the Northern Ireland conflict, started life in the 1930s in the tough Hammer district of Belfast's lower Shankill. After serving in Cyprus with the Royal Ulster Rifles during the EOKA campaign, he became leader of the Shankill Ulster Volunteer Force, a dormant paramilitary organisation which was reactivated in 1965 in a climate of growing loyalist disquiet.
In 1966 he was sentenced to a minimum of twenty years imprisonment for the murder of a Catholic barman, a charge he has always denied. In 1977, as UVF commander inside the Maze prison, he issued a message supporting reconciliation and attacking violence as counter-productive. Released in 1983, he devoted himself to community politics and became a key strategist with the Progressive Unionist Party, playing a very significant role in the developing peace process. His central role was underlined in 1994 at a Combined Loyalist Military Command press conference, when he announced a loyalist ceasefire, and offered 'abject and true remorse' to 'innocent victims.'
As a close friend of Gutsy Spence, the author has had access to a wealth of new material and remarkably candid interviews. The result is a lively - and heartening - insight into one of the most influential figures of the Troubles.
The Ogham Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Ireland edited by Gerald Dawe and Michael Mulreany
Paperback; 10.00 IEP / 12.25 USD / 8.50 UK / 12.70 EURO; IPA, 230 pages [Add To Basket]This book captures the vibrancy and diversity of Irish writing by bringing together a remarkable and gifted group of writers who have contributed over the past twenty years to the pioneering literature programme at the Institute of Public Administration in Dublin. From Landsdowne Road to Hong Kong, James Clarence Mangan to U2, the subjects in this anthology take the reader on a refreshing and eclectic journey through poetry, fiction, memoir, rock music, modern art, literary criticism, and cultural argument.
The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse edited, with translations by, Thomas Kinsella
Paperback; 14.00 IEP / 16.50 USD / 11.00 UK / 18.80 EURO; OUP, 424 pages [Add To Basket]This anthology presents the Irish tradition as a unity: verse in Irish and English, usually regarded separately, are shown as elements in a shared and often painful history. The selection is in three parts: it begins with earliest, pre-Christian times and the first poetry in English from the fourteenth century; moves on to Irish bardic poetry and English poetry in the era of Swift and Goldsmith; and closes with nineteenth and twentieth-century poets, from Davis, Mangan, and Ferguson to Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, and a number of poets born around the time of Yeats's death.
The Nowhere Birds by Caitriona O'Reilly
Paperback; 9.00 IEP / 11.00 USD / 7.50 UK / 11.50 EURO; Bloodaxe, 63 pages [Add To Basket]This book introduces a young Irish writer of remarkable maturity and narrative power. The book's holding pattern is set by questions of location and flight, beginning with views of childhood and adolescence, then moving outwards in poems of daringly imaginative range-finding.
'As I was among the captives': Joseph Campbell's Prison Diary, 1922-1928 by Eilean No Chuilleanain
Paperback; 8.99 IEP / 11.00 USD / 7.50 UK / 11.50 EURO; Cork University Press, 137 pages [Add To Basket]Joseph Campbell (1879-1944) was a talented poet, reared in Catholic Belfast, who became a pioneer of Irish Studies in the United States. His reputation as an Irish Irelander was gained in London, but in 1921 he settled outside Dublin and soon became active in radical nationalism. In the revolutionary years he became a republican justice and local councillor in Co. Wicklow. Having opposed the Anglo-Irish treaty, he was arrested in Bray, spending the entire Civil War interned in Mountjoy and Tintown on the Curragh. His voluminous diaries, cannily concealed from his captors, provide much more than a chronicle of events and experiences. Being the work of a skilled writer and acute observer, they offer revealing cameos of his republican colleagues, vivid notes of personal conversations, and imaginative reflections on the psychological effects of incarceration.
Louie Bennett by Rosemary Cullen Owens
Paperback; 12.95 IEP / 15.50 USD / 11.00 UK / 16.50 EURO; Cork University Press, 160 pages [Add To Basket]Louie Bennett (1870-1956) was one of the most prominent female public figures of the Irish twentieth century. A suffrage campaigner, an advocate of peace, and an important trade unionist, she was an influential personality on the international stage as well as in Ireland. In this first biography of Bennett, the author examines the complexity of her public live and details her connections to various social and political movements. Particular attention is paid to her involvement in the Irish Women's Workers Union of which she was a leading member for many years.
The Faith of the Catholic Church by Bishop David Konstant
Paperback; 12.95 IEP / 15.50 USD / 11.00 UK / 16.50 EURO; Veritas, 135 pages [Add To Basket]This book contains information of the faith and moral teaching of the Catholic Church. It is adapted from an Italian text, translated, with some traditional prayers of Ireland selected by Bishop Thomas Finnegan, and includes illustrations from the Book of Kells.
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