Read Ireland Book Reviews, June 1999

Shadow Box by Antonia Logue
“You’d dip into Cravan for a day and come out of an acid bath, your body corroding, sinuses so full of poison those inner canals in your ears would hear nothing but a high wasting moan and your balance would be all shot to hell. He strode around Berlin wearing hookers on his shoulders, them tittering and screeching down the Kurfurstendam like they were queens on a float, then leave them back where he found them, all legs and suicide.” In her dazzling first novel, Antonia Logue weaves together the lives of three extraordinary characters: Jack Johnson, who punched his way out of the dockyards of Galveton to become the first black heavyweight champion of the world; Arthur Cravan, the dadaist provocateur who was competing for the heart of the English Modernist poet Mina Loy, the third charismatic figure in this triangle. It was in 1908 that Johnson was crowned world champion to the great chagrin of the American public, scandalised by his fast cars, debauchery, taste for women, and the fact that he couldn’t be beaten. Forced to flee to Europe to escape being jailed on trumped-up-charges, he met Cravan, and together they dreamed up a brilliant scam to get Cravan to New York: the staged a fight to pay for his passage. Soon Cravan was shocking the arts patrons of New York society with a Futurist manifesto-cum-drunken rant that landed him in jail his antics egged on by friends such as Marcel Duchamp. But Cravan’s time in New York also gave rise to a passionate love affair with the celebrated modernist poet, Mina Loy. Theirs was a great love, interrupted by a great war. They had an idyllic wedding in Mexico, and the Cravan fleeing conscription sailed into a hurricane and was presumed dead. In this book the author has written a sweeping story of love and friendship. Letters between Jack and Mina unfold a compulsively readable tale of love, art, and boxing, ranging across the United States and Europe in an era of tremendous social, artistic, and political upheaval. Told in a powerful voice, with warm humour, and a vigorous historical imagination, it marks the debut of a vibrant and electrifying new talent.

As It Is In Heaven by Niall Williams
“There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death and, between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God. God is the greatest puzzle of all.” In this follow-up to the enormously-popular and successful ‘Four Letters of Love,’ Niall Williams has created a life-affirming, sparkling tale of love and strength in the face of human tragedy. Stephen Griffin is a shy and lonely schoolteacher in the West of Ireland, and his father Philip is a tailor whose wife and daughter died tragically in a car crash fifteen years ago. While Stephen yearns for love and an escape from the monotony of the classroom, his father’s only desire is to be reunited with his family in heaven. The appearance of Gabriella Castoldi, a spellbinding musician, turns Stephen’s fairy tales into reality. Now both men have a purpose: Stephen’s to secure Gabriella’s love and Philip’s to help him in his task by making the best suit of his career. Stephen’s journey to love and happiness is the greatest and most courageous of his life, as he desperately follows Gabriella to Venice and back again to the West of Ireland. Filled with the coincidences and harsh vicissitudes of true life, this novel confirms the author as one of the outstanding Irish novelists of today

Sport and Nationalism: Gaelic Games, Soccer and Irish Identity Since 1884 by Mike Cronin
This book examines the development of a nationalist agenda within Irish sport and searches for a definition of nationalism in this context. The question of what Irish nationalism is and what forces shape it has stretched the minds of generations of Irish historians. For some the answer has been found within the realms of political history, while others have examined how the cultural impact of Irish literature and drama has shaped nationalism. Sport offers a new way of looking at nationalism as it offers mass-consumed low culture as a vehicle. This book defines sporting nationalism through the experience of Gaelic games and soccer as examples of mass spectator sport.

An Ulster Voice: In Search of Common Ground in Northern Ireland by Gary McMichael
The groundbreaking peace accord in Northern Ireland is a story of disparate political factions coming together to work out a blueprint for peace in a country beset by political and sectarian violence since the 1960s. An important development within the talks came from the Ulster Democratic Party, moderate Unionists whose flexible and pragmatic views are a radical change from the extreme views of more traditional Unionists. Their leader, Gary McMichael, a signatory to the Good Friday Agreement, gives an insider’s perspective on the Loyalists’ search for peace, a view often ignored in the media. McMichael’s thoughtful accounts of visits to the White House and meetings with British, Irish and American politicians, as well as his insightful analyses of the ceasefires, the resumption of IRA violence, orange parades, and Unionist culture reveal a crucial part of the complex puzzle that is Northern Ireland today and the momentous events now taking place.

The Beauty of the Moon by Anne Haverty
Anne Haverty’s first collection of poetry is infused with the yearning and disillusion that we associate with the fin de siecle. Haunted by a sense of the passing of time and its mutabilities, the poems are also meditations on the inevitability of separateness between mothers and daughters, town and country, past and present, life and death. Wonderfully varied inform and content, this collection introduces a poet of considerable range and talent.

Brow Head by John Boland
John Boland’s poems are both melancholy and vital, says Frank Ormsby. Celebrant and elegist, Boland writes movingly, with passionate restraint, of the joys and insecurities that give tension to our lives. And Thomas Kilroy wrote about this collection: These fine poems speak to us with direct lucidity and moral energy about the frail connections of human relationships. The book creates a highly literate, personal, inner world.

A Little Bit of Heaven: An Irish-American Anthology by Sean McMahon
This anthology consists of popular songs, verse and prose, which reflect the experience of the Irish in America. It includes such perennial favourites as: ‘A Little Bit of Heaven’, ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’, ‘Mush, Mush, Too-ral-I-aday’, ‘Macnamara’s Band’, ‘Mick McGilligan’s Ball’. The work of such ‘native’ Irish-Americans as Finley Peter Dunne, George M. Cohan and Chauncey Olcott features, as well as verse by John Boyle O’Reilly, Thomas D’Arcy Magee and J.I.C. Clarke. This book is a treasure trove for all those interested in traditional and popular music, Irish and American alike.

The Friendship Tree: The Life and Poems of Davoren Hanna
This book is the story of a young Dublin-born writer, Davoren Hanna (1975-1994), a gifted, cunning and often ruthless poet who, while profoundly handicapped, struggled to do justice in language to the turbulence and wonder within him. Davoren’s mother (1944-1990), a deeply intelligent and passionate women, battled for years against the helplessness and scepticism of the experts in the face of Davoren’s handicaps and, in the end, literally laid her life on the line to help give her son a voice. In this book Davoren’s father, Jack, gives a searing account of the heartbreak and exhilaration behind the sometimes baffling public face of his son, whose poetry won acclaim in Britain and Ireland, and whose ebullient spirit won the hearts of those he touched during his short life.

Observatory by Daragh Carville
This play is set at the Armagh Observatory and Museum for Astronomy and Natural Philosophy, in both 1799 and 1999. Jon McKenna, hired to compile a computerised catalogue of the Observatory archives, finds his life becoming entangled with that of Nicola McLoughlin, assistant astronomer at the Observatory. Together they work to uncover the 200 year old story of astronomer Archibald Hamilton and his assistant Robert Hogg man of science, man of God, and revolutionary. A gothic thriller, Observatory details the entangled lives of four people across two centuries. The Observatory, a symbol of both science and religion, becomes the setting for a powerful exploration of nationhood and revolution, love and betrayal.

Many Young men of Twenty/Moll/The Chastitute by John B. Keane
John B. Keane, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday, is an Irish literary legend. He has lived in Listowel, Co Kerry, for most of his life, where he presides over one of the liveliest and most literary pubs in the country. The three plays collected here are among his best works for the theatre. Many Young Men of Twenty, a musical play, deals with emigration and the lack of jobs at home that forced people to leave their native Ireland for England. Moll is a hilarious and highly successful comedy about Irish life in an Irish country prebystery. And in The Chastitute, the author holds some very ‘sacred cows’ up to ridicule via the main character who is a person without holy orders and who has never lain down with a woman.

Rough Magic First Plays edited by Siobhan Bourke
This anthology of ‘first plays’ by Irish writers reflects the diversity and innovation that has come to describe contemporary Irish theatre, epitomised by the creative output of Rough Magic Theatre Company from its formation in 1984. From the glamour and excess of classic Hollywood to a darkly comic exploration of adolescent sexuality in the provincial backwaters of 1970s Ireland, what these plays have in common is an authentic and original vision and a tale worth telling. The plays included are: I Can’t Get Started by Declan Hughes; The Dogs by Donal O’Kelly; Down Onto Blue by Pom Boyd; Hidden Charges by Arthur Riordan; Danti-Dan by Gina Moxley; and Mrs. Sweeney by Paula Meehan.

The Ballad of HMS Belfast by Ciaran Carson
This compendium, made from the poet’s previous collections, reveals one of the most remarkable and sustained tours de force in contemporary poetry: the poet’s reimagining of his native city of Belfast. Carson introduces the reader to a city as full of surreal narrative and imaginative possibility as Borges’ Buenos Aires or Calvino’s Venice; at the same time he never shirk s from taking a hard look at the city in all its political and cultural complexity.