Please note - Poetry Books by Michael Coady are also published by Gallery Press - they are listed in in the Poetry Collections by Local Writers section - here
Hecuba by Marina Carr
In the aftermath of the fall of Troy, Agamemnon, the victor, locks horns with Hecuba, the vanquished queen. Both have suffered intimate loss — the sacrifice of a daughter, the murder of a son.
How glorious it all was. How glorious they all were.
We mustn’t judge things by their end.
We mustn’t judge things by their end.
In Marina Carr’s bold response to Euripides (‘the most intensely tragic of all poets’ — Aristotle) there’s a demand for further bloodshed. In a brilliant display of ventriloquism the drama weaves threads of inconsolable rage and grief with fate, revenge and inevitable carnage. It explores the shreds of duty and honour as well as the terrible deeds hatred breeds as it touches bravely on Hecuba’s heroic nature and ‘the endless tears of women’.
‘I am not aware of another woman who writes about tragedy with such grandeur. She goes to a deep place that has not just to do with society now but that touches an inner tragedy of existence.‘ — Joyce McMillen, New York Times
‘Marina Carr is not only one of the finest women playwrights of her generation, but simply one of the finest playwrights of any generation. Marina’s work is infused with a rawness, a dynamism and an energy unlike almost any other contemporary playwright. From plays like The Mai to By the Bog of Cats and On Raftery’s Hill, her plays are private, personal epics, heavily influenced by the Greek classics and at the same time uniquely contemporary and Irish. Marina’s work is linguistically brave and forceful, and is beautifully rendered and passionate. In short, Marina Carr’s work represents everything that great theatre should be.’ — Orlaith McBride, Director, Arts Council of Ireland. (Gallery Press). Price: €11.95.
Collected by Seán Dunne
Published posthumously, Collected, a book of poems and translations, celebrates a sorely lamented voice in Irish poetry. Inevitably, Seán Dunne’s three collections are the quoinstones of this book. Included also are unpublished and previously uncollected works, notably his long ‘Letter from Ireland’ and a substantial selection of translations from Anna Akhmatova.
Peter Fallon’s ‘Afterwords’ describes Seán Dunne’s enduring themes, his hungers and his spiritual growth, and the arc of his emergence as a quietly insistent and necessary poet. More than twenty years ago (in what has proved a prescient review), Brendan Kennelly applauded Seán Dunne’s ‘dedication and accomplishment . . . constantly pitting his own values against the pain, suffering, violence and futility of the world. And his values are strong, perhaps lasting ones’ — a judgement this ample collection corroborates. (Gallery Press).
Faith Healer Play by Brian Friel
Faith Healer is 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. (Gallery Press).
Price: €10.95
Aristocrats by Brian Friel
[‘Aristocrats is] an ironic, loving, imaginative, and all but faultless play. Make that a faultless play.’
— Edith Oliver, The New Yorker
— Edith Oliver, The New Yorker
‘a lovely play, funny and harrowing . . . Mr Friel makes the Irish condition synonymous with the human one.’
— Frank Rich, The New York Times
— Frank Rich, The New York Times
Brian Friel‘s Aristocrats was first produced by the Abbey Theatre in 1979 and won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play (1988) and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play (1989). Set in Ballybeg Hall in County Donegal, the decaying home of District Justice O’Donnell, where those who congregate for a wedding stay to attend a funeral, Friel’s chronicle of three sisters and their ‘peculiar’ brother reveals the way ‘in which the ache of one family becomes the microcosm for the ache of a society’. (Gallery Press). €12.50
X by Vona Groarke
X by Vona Groarke is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
X (noun) — 24th letter of the English alphabet;
signifies an unknown person or thing;
multiplication sign;
a signature substitute;
used to represent a choice or a vote;
used to indicate a mistake;
a mark for treasure on a map;
a sex chromosome;
a kiss . . .
signifies an unknown person or thing;
multiplication sign;
a signature substitute;
used to represent a choice or a vote;
used to indicate a mistake;
a mark for treasure on a map;
a sex chromosome;
a kiss . . .
From X-Factor to X-rated, the third least common letter in the English alphabet appears commonly in life. In this sixth collection from this award-winning poet, X occurs when the known and the intuited cross each other’s paths.These poems take pleasure in surface and depth. From the luminous colour of the garden sequence to its response to the transcendent spaces of Danish artist, Vilhelm Hammershøi, X marks feeling and experience in language as daring as it is beautiful. This is a book of candour and poise: a groundbreaking publication from a writer hailed in Poetry Ireland Review as ‘among the best Irish poets writing today’.
‘Groarke’s syntax offers a sophisticated blend of craft and craftiness, full of subtle manoeuvres that wrong-foot the reader, even as it stays within earshot of the speech patterns of the Irish Midlands, where the poet was born. Her conclusions are emphatic but they are never theatrical, as when the title poem having considered various connotations of ‘x’, from ‘a shape / signifying nothing’ to ‘the length of breadth of days / that bleed into other days’, finally alights on the closing image: ‘the blades of a bedroom ceiling fan / come to / a perfectly obvious stop’. By forgoing the showy, self-dramatising gestures of much contemporary poetry, Groarke clears a space for her poem to enter. What follows is a single sentence that unspools over nine three-line stanzas and considers the ‘price to be paid / for the want of love’. X is an outstanding collection by a poet at the height of her powers.’ — Paul Batchelor, The New Statesman (Gallery Press). Price: €18.50
Four Sides Full by Vona Groarke
Four Sides Full is a book-length personal essay by one of Ireland’s leading poets. Her collections have all displayed a fascination with the visual arts but Four Sides Full takes a different approach. In considering frames and what they bring to an artwork it reflects on themes of containment and exclusion, and how a life can flit between.
An unusual fusion of ideas, history and memoir, this essay opens up and out about subjects such as the body, family, the past, love, beauty and solitude. It is a poet’s view magnified by prose, an essay of uncommon clarity and candour.
With its seriousness of purpose, its dignity and its scope, Four Sides Full is a model of style and a triumph in a genre rarely tackled these days. (Gallery Press). Price €12.50
Selected Poems by Vona Groarke
Vona Groarke’s Shale (1994) announced a richly gifted poet. Selected Poems draws on that first collection and five books since which, between them, have received several awards: two have been Recommendations of the Poetry Book Society.
Noted as ‘adroit, precise and intellectually daring’ (Warwick Review), her poems are also haunting and candidly sensual. In a talk at the Irish Arts Center in New York Nick Laird extolled a voice ‘always modulated beautifully, assured and daring, often wry, (that) in the end keeps faith with the world’.
Her work has been recognized as one of Irish poetry’s ‘most consistently satisfying voices’ (Agenda) and ‘among the best Irish poets writing today’ (Poetry Ireland Review).
Selected Poems presents more than twenty years’ work by one of the finest poets of her generation. (Gallery Press). Price: €12.50
Cry for the Hot Belly by Kerry Hardie
Cry for the Hot Belly recognizes also the appearance of death in the author’s life as a familiar visitor. Her reconciliation with mortality fosters a new freedom in which Kerry Hardie discovers a point of arrival: ‘I don’t have to remember or hold on. / I live this now, it is deep in the life.’
‘She looks like the real thing alright, an original talent. Discovering her work reminds me of the pleasurable shock of hearing Medbh McGuckian’s poetry for the first time.’
— Michael Longley, Poetry Ireland Review
— Michael Longley, Poetry Ireland Review
Kerry Hardie’s second collection extends the wonder, the ‘small deep awe’ of its precursor, A Furious Place. To the calm reflection of ‘Monaghan Solstice’ and other landscapes ‘lit from elsewhere’, she introduces (in ‘Exiles’) a narrative sweep embracing generations and questions of nationality. (Gallery Press). Price €11.95.
Selected Poems by Kerry Hardie
Kerry Hardie’s five collections, published by The Gallery Press, have garnered praise and prizes and have attracted a growing band of devoted readers. Her work is celebrated for its particular way of seeing, a rhapsodic recording of landscape and weather in cherished places — the valleys around her Kilkenny home, ancient monastic settlements and isolated islands.
Selected Poems distils almost twenty years’ work, charts adventures in Australia, China, Paris and the Pyrenees and encompasses grief and loss while honouring thirty years of marriage. Above all, her work maps emotional states, ‘the way things are’ . . . ‘all as it is’ . . . ‘Lives. Theirs, ours. Human times are mostly hard.’ A long sequence explores the trials of exile. Yet for all such hardships her parables of experience find and offer consolation.
In Poetry Ireland Review Jaki McCarrick recently commended the poems’ ‘deep slow burn . . . Long after they have been read their profound and simple power persists.’ (Gallery Press). €12.50.
A Necklace of Wrens by Michael Harnett
Besides gathering a distinguished body of original work in Irish this book invites readers of English to savour another dimension of an abundantly talented poet.
A Necklace of Wrens presents a generous selection of Michael Hartnett’s poems in Irish and his own translations of them into English. Among the poems gleaned from his first collection in Irish, Adharca Broic, which won The Irish Poetry Award in 1980, is ‘Cúlú Íde / ‘The Retreat of Ita Cagney’. It includes also poems from Do Nuala: Foighne Chrainn and two significant long poems, ‘An Phurgóid / ‘The Purge’ and a magnificent meditation, ‘An Lia Nocht’ / ‘The Naked Surgeon’. (Gallery Press). €12.95.
New Selected Poems by Derek Mahon
New Selected Poems is a book of singular abundance and formal verve, featuring poems of rare vision and dramatic power by an exceptional and resilient artist. Demonstrating the wide range of Derek Mahon’s verse, from the early lyricism to a more expansive middle period (‘New York Time’, ‘Decadence’) and the flowering of his late style.
More than 40 years since their first publication, Mahon lyrics such as those of“Glengormley”, “An Image from Beckett” and “Lives” retain their crystalline wonder. Marvellian cadence and existential menace are thrillingly conjoined. Where Seamus Heaney used his bog bodies to enter the mind of the tribe, “Lives” issues stark warnings to us to revise our “insolent ontology”. “Courtyards in Delft” is Vermeeresque in its capturing of the poet’s childhood, and of the eerie calm of art in the midst of social turmoil. “A Disused Shed in Co Wexford”, that hymn of distress in the face of historical atrocity, is truly Yeatsian in scope and ambition. — David Wheatley, The Guardian. (The Gallery Press). Price €13.90
Selected Poems by Medbh McGuckian’s
Selected Poems contains generous selections from Medbh McGuckian’s first five books which serve as an introduction to this gloriously gifted — and pioneering — poet, as a stock-taking moment to reconsider her luxuriant constructions, and as a welcome occasion to learn further how to receive the signals of her opulent imagination. The sensual, rhapsodic implications of her early work and the engagement of more recent poems with the politics of her native province represent a convincing vision.
Selected Poems marries intellectual and emotional courage with vital language, startling but appropriate image, and beguiling art.
‘These are, finally, extraordinary poems about everyday life. It is time more of us read them.’ — Stephen Burt, TLS
‘This selection has been beautifully chosen to introduce her to a new audience. Here are classically clear, startling lyrics with a buried wildness: poems to break your heart and save it. … Marvellous.’ — The Poetry Book Society (Gallery Press). €11.95
Blaris Moor by Medbh McGuckian
Medbh McGuckian extended the range of Irish poetry. Her gloriously mysterious work calls to mind the rhapsodic utterances of Emily Dickinson and (though with more sensuality) an older contemporary, John Ashbery.
Blaris Moor takes as its title and starting point a traditional popular ballad that commemorates the trial, conviction and execution of four militiamen in 1797. Larger conflicts shadow these poems, including World Wars I and II. Meditations on the Flight of the Earls in the early 1600s move to thoughts of the Somme and Flanders.
Drawing on diverse, arcane sources, Medbh McGuckian constructs poems that have their own cohesiveness. Frequently her patterns of thought and syntax resist meaning. Hers is an art to be apprehended more than comprehended.
But there are poems here that feature the courtroom drama of direct political address and, most satisfyingly and surprisingly, a number of shorter pieces, evocative in their concentration of Medbh McGuckian’s earlier work and of the poems which secured her reputation. (Gallery Press). €11.95
In a Town of Five Thousand People by Frank McGuinness
In a Town of Five Thousand People, Frank McGuinness’s fifth collection, demonstrates again the ‘energy and intensity’ Peter Denman noted in Poetry Ireland Review. The scathing invective of ‘The Town Next to Us’, a series of loving elegies for artists and actors and a record of struggles with religious ties anatomize ‘the darkness within the darkness’.
The broad sweep of ‘Heligan’, brief poems of lyric pitch, ‘American Football in Booterstown Park’, ‘Limerick Junction and Marco Polo’ display an imagination given free rein. Urgent and prodigious, this is a book of wide-reaching embrace. (Gallery Press). Price: €13.90
General Admission by Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon is, by common consent — in his native Ireland, England and the United States — the outstanding poet of his generation and a leading modern writer. General Admission followed hot on the heels of The End of the Poem — a series of lectures he delivered as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and Horse Latitudes. Wildly allusive and inventive, General Admission includes ‘My Ride’s Here’, co-written with Warren Zevon and recorded by Bruce Springsteen, and a feast of lyrics for songs he has been performing since 2004 as a member of Rackett, a band that played ‘what can only be described as three-car-garage rock’.
(Gallery Press). €13.90
Rising to the Rising by Paul Muldoon
Rising to the Rising collects Paul Muldoon’s various responses in English and Irish to commissions from the Irish Writers’ Centre, New York University, Poetry Ireland, RTÉ and others to compose verses to mark seminal moments in a country’s history. They evoke tragic aspects and the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Battle of the Somme just a few months later.
The work of a limitlessly gifted writer, it includes what might be the most enduring achievements of a nation’s celebrations and commemorations.
‘One of the artistic centrepieces of this year’s commemorations was the performance of this rap-like text by Paul Muldoon [‘One Hundred Years a Nation’], with music by Shaun Davey played by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and sung by 1,100 voices. It was moving and celebratory but also scathing and provocative, giving space to “gombeen financiers”, “parish parasites”, ghost estates, mass emigration, “bloody assassinations” and the “bomb’s abominations”. It is hard to think of another nation that would acknowledge its failings so furiously even as it celebrates its foundations.’
— Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times. (The Gallery Press). Price: €10
— Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times. (The Gallery Press). Price: €10
Jim Nolan‘s play, Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye
Jim Nolan‘s play, Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye, complements a body of work that is as varied as it is impressive.
The cream rises to the top. What’s left is expendable . . .
As it prepares to mark the centenary of 1916 and the opening of the Memorial Peace Park changes are being forced on The Derryshannon Chronicle, a local paper once family-owned and now being absorbed into an international media conglomerate. Coyne’s old-school values and the innocent enthusiasm of a new recruit clash with the cynicism of a temporary manager whose sole interest is profit.
Add in a Latvian immigrant’s prediction of the Second Coming on Easter Sunday, a ferret on the loose at Mass, the disappearance of a solicitor with questions to answer and revelations about the burial place of one of the ‘disappeared’ to savour the exact and entertaining relevance of Jim Nolan’s provocative and probing play.
‘Jim Nolan has an unapologetic affection for small-town life. But it never blinds him to its dangers and its faults. There are distinct echoes of Lennox Robinson in his work: and that is no small compliment. And this is never more clear than in his new play Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye, set in the fictional midland town of Inishannon in the (very) near future . . . Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye is an old-fashioned, well-made play, about old-fashioned, well-tested moralities.’ — Emer O’Kelly, Irish Independent. (Gallery Press). €11.95
The Rooms by Peter Sirr
The Rooms cements Peter Sirr’s connection with the things around us — pavements sing, bricks breathe and shift underfoot. In the stunning title-sequence, he leads us on a ghostly walk through rooms of a distant memory, creating an uncanny reflection of the spaces we all inhabit.’
— Poetry Book Society ‘Autumn Reading’
— Poetry Book Society ‘Autumn Reading’
Peter Sirr’s eighth collection is characteristically finely tuned to the facts and flux of contemporary life. The Rooms continues and broadens the adventurous exploration of the room as a ‘stanza’. Another long series, ‘An Audience with BB’, arranges pieces of a jigsaw to invoke the spirit of Bertolt Brecht and to converse with it in a sparkling display. With its European perspectives and rich imaginings, this copious book is a model of style as distinctive as a fingerprint.
The mapmaker downed his tools.
I’ve caught it: every alley, every street . . .
the city fixed and framed.
Now I want everything else . . .
I’ve caught it: every alley, every street . . .
the city fixed and framed.
Now I want everything else . . .
The Rooms is an astonishing work which takes the reader deep into the heart of the spaces we have sometimes created for ourselves, whether in our cities, our homes, our rooms, or indeed out in the vast space of the natural world. The book is imbued with an energy and pace, with the flavours and scents of ordinary life, especially in Dublin, but it also offers an undertow that is decidedly European in feeling. What I most admired about this collection was the manner in which his subjects are explored. The writing is unhurried, perfectly crafted, and reveals the exemplary patience that rests at the heart of the work of a true poet . . . He is without question the leading poet of his generation. — Mary O’Donnell (Gallery Press). €11.95
The Thing is by Peter Sirr
From a glimpse of his pregnant wife and the ensuing epiphany, ‘we are walking slowly out of our old lives’, an extended sequence at the heart of Peter Sirr’s collection, The Thing Is, conscribes the reality of new life and new joy, including an interlude in rural Ireland. ‘Here you are,’ he writes in ‘The Overgrown Path’, ‘disposed in light / and the company of trees / and here am I, applauding.’
The sureness of his poems’ footing interprets Dublin for a modern age. His preoccupation with language and the integrity of process endures and expands as he continues to translate past and recent experiences into coherent, convincing forms. The book’s coda, ‘Carmina’, is an energetic rendering of the sexual shenanigans and invective of Catullus’s originals. Amplified by broad perspectives and keen intelligence, The Thing Is is the most personal and engaging of Peter Sirr’s collections.
‘Sirr is also known as a poet of impersonality, one who in his own words avoids “poetry of the foregrounded self” and “detailed narratives of personal life”. Yet many poems in The Thing Is, though not quite confessional, adopt a personal, intimate approach and are undoubtedly among the most nakedly biographical pieces he has published to date. This new volume, then, not only plays to and consolidates Sirr’s strengths but also gestures toward new ground. It represents another milestone on a unique poetic journey.’ — Billy Ramsell, Southword (Gallery Press). €11.95
