Read Ireland Book Reviews, December 1999

Poems 1975-1995 by Micheal O’Siadhail
Micheal O’Siadhail’s poetry has always set the interests of a life against the backdrop of worlds shaken by change. He constantly seeks new dimensions: delving passions of friendship, marriage, trust and betrayal in an urban culture, exploring the intricacies of music and science as he tried to shape an understanding of the shifts and transformations of late modernity. This book traces the continuity of a poetic voice resonating with classic traditions. This selection is taken from nine books and contains an illuminating introduction by the author in which he draws together the strands of a poetry that ‘comes from the core,’ ‘an endless jazz improvisation.’

Collected Poems by Derek Mahon
This volume brings together in updated form, the poems the author ‘wishes to preserve’ from the work of forty years. Highly praised at home and abroad, they range in time and space from the early ‘Beyond Howth Head’ and ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ to the ambitions later sequences, ‘The Hudson Letter’ and ‘The Yellow Book’. The collection closes with a group of new poems.

Falling Into Monaghan by Gerald Hull
This collection is a study of the poet’s ‘settlement in the west’ in South Ulster on the border territory near the Slieve Beagh mountains. It deals with the consciousness of a kind of desolation that is sometimes bitter, often vigorous, frequently comic. Filtered through this, uniquely, are commentaries on the author’s London Irish/Italian background.

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Still Listening by Angela Patten
The poems in this collection depend on memory and dreams as their inexhaustible source. They describe a sense of living between two worlds the romantic America of childhood and the folklore of the remembered Irish past. Patten’s poems illustrate the notion that making poetry is the process of making the familiar strange, of drawing attention to a wisdom and humour that is intrinsic to everyday Irish speech. These poems come directly out of an oral tradition in which family troubles re turned into familiar stories that can be retold and relished again and again. It is these stories and their peculiarly Irish turns of phrase that lend a characteristic music and texture to the poems.

The Interior Act by Frank Golden
The Interior Act is a movement from terror to a kind of interior place, interspersed with praise, obsession, memory, rant, death, love. Unusual in a poetry collection, the author explores at length the fracturing actions and memories of an imagined life and the fragmented witness of an alter-life. The landscape of the mind is a central theme in his work, and in this collection he negotiates a narrow path through poems and fragments which attempt to declare their truth; be it brutal, glorious, desperate, solacing.

Tenant by Maighread Medbh
Tenant is a narrative sequence, following the fictional O’Sullivan family through the traumatic famine years, 1845 to 1849. The main character is Rena, whose personal journey through the period represents the shock, struggle, devastation and dubious resolution through death that marked the time. Her father, Peadar, is also central to the story and his inability to blossom in his life is another kind of hunger. From the first, these poems were an attempted retrospective incarnation, a transporting backwards of characters who are also recognisable in our time. It involves opening the ear to their voices and to the voices of the terrain, inner and outer.

Half-Day Warriors by John Kavanagh
This is the second collection from the Listowel Writers’ Week prize-winner. In this collection the poet brings to his readers a maturing and developing talent, with which he continues to explore his favourite themes: the energies and impulses, the gains and losses of love; a highly developed awareness of a sense of place in the post-modern work; and, a growing awareness of the tension between inner and outer, private and public worlds.

All the Money in the World by John Menaghan
In an array of approaches as varied as its subject matter, this book explores love, loss, music, mystery, tensions, terrors, ecstasies, and endings. By turns lyrical, abstract, anguished, celebratory, humorous and reflective, these poems move between a nuanced appreciation of how things are and an intense longing for how they might be.

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Poet’s Tower and Love Poems by Bernard Kennedy
This collection of poetry places its emphasis on nature, love and contemporary issues. It is a commentary on the Ireland of today in poetry form, and a view of women’s search for equality. Those who love animals will find ‘a sad parting’ a touching animal tribute; while ‘A Woman’s question’ illustrates the continuing need for equality. The tragedy of Omagh, in ‘Bombed in Omagh’, reflects the darkness of Ireland, and ‘Half Moon Street’ is a tribute to the war poets.

The White Page: An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets by Joan McBreen
This book is a comprehensive study of Irish women’s poetry published in book form in the twentieth century. It is an extended annotated directory, with biographical and bibliographical details on each poet. Poems and photographs, donated by the poets themselves, are also included. Includes poets born in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland as well as those of Irish ancestry and non-nationals who have been resident in Ireland for long periods. A reference book for all students of Irish literature, it is also a poetry anthology featuring more than 100 Irish women poets who have published at least one collection.

John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland by John Cooney
This is the first major study of the life and times of John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin, who for more than three decades, from 1940 to 1972, dominated political and social and religious developments in Ireland. While Archbishop McQuaid ranks as one of the great social reformers of independent Ireland, he was also a ‘control freak’. A superb administrator, and an admirer of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, he imposed his iron will on Irish politics and society by instilling fear among his clergy and people. Resolutely opposed to Communism and liberals, McQuaid’s ‘vigilance committee’ kept files on politicians and priests, workers and students, doctors and lawyers, nuns and nurses, housewives and trade unionists, writers and film-makers. There was no room for dissent. His ambition was directed towards the building up of a truly Catholic State he attempted to exclude Protestants, Jews, liberal Catholics and feminists. This book tells the inside story of how McQuaid crushed the attempts of the reformist Minister for Health, Dr. Noel Browne, to introduce a free welfare system for mothers and children. It also shows how McQuaid exercised enormous power over all aspects of government: education, hospitals, the adoption services, penal institutions and criminal justice system. For Protestants in Northern Ireland, he embodied their fears of ‘Rome Rule’. This book for the first time looks at the career of this giant in Irish life, who also wielded enormous influence in defining Ireland’s relations with the Vatican and the Irish Catholic diaspora world-wide. In this exceptional study, McQuaid comes to life as an extraordinary man, able to seize every opportunity to forward his ideals and those of his Church.

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Short Fellow: A Biography of Charles Haughey by T. Ryle Dwyer
Adored and reviled in equal measure, Charles Haughey has been one of the most significant and controversial Irish political leaders of the late 20th century. From humble beginnings in Dublin’s northside, he rose to become a powerful minister in the Fianna Fail government in the 1960s, a period of expansion and liberalisation in Irish society. He was responsible for modernising and enlightened legislation in the financial, judicial, social and arts areas, but his career suffered a near-fatal eclipse when he was a defendant in the Arms Trial of 1970. Pundits wrote that his career was finished but before the end of the decade he emerged from the political wilderness to lead Fianna Fail and become Taoiseach. He not only headed several single-party governments in the 1980s, but led his party into its first coalition. As controversial in government as he was out of it, he was as cursed with shady friends as he was blessed with incompetent enemies. From the 1960s onwards, Haughey lived in regal splendour in a Georgian mansion outside Dublin. He bought an offshore island, where he built a residence in the style of a latter-day Gaelic chieftain, transporting all the building materials for it by helicopter. Rumours abounded about the sources of his wealth, which he flaunted, but he contemptuously refused to address them. It was not until the summer of 1998, with the revelations of a judicial tribunal, that it emerged that Haughey was the beneficiary of donations totalling millions of pounds from wealthy Irish businessmen and that he had had hundred of thousands of pounds of debts written off by the Allied Irish Bank, Ireland’s largest banking group. In 1999, his long-term affair with Dublin socialite Terry Keane became public when she bragged shamelessly about it on the country’s most popular television show. In his final speech in the Dail, Haughey claimed, like Othello, to ‘have done the state some service’. No amount of demonising can take that away from him. His dazzling achievements include the establishment of the magnificent International Financial Services Centre in Dublin and his leadership of a government that rescued the country from near-bankruptcy in the late 1980s. The aim of this biography is to present a balanced picture of the man: a fallen idol and flawed genius.

Dark Hollow by John Connolly
‘The girls hung from an oak, an old mature tree with a thick, gnarled trunk and heavy extended branches like splayed fingers. They turned slowly, black against the sun, their bare feet pointing at the ground, their hands loose by their sides, their heads lolling to one side. Some were naked, while tattered dresses still clung to others. They pirouetted in mid air, like ghosts of five dancers no longer restricted by the pull of gravity.’ John Connolly’s first novel, ‘Every Dead Thing’ was uniformly hailed as a ‘spellbinder’ and ‘stunner’, ‘a complex tale that is riveting and chilling.’ In this new novel featuring again his main character of Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, Connolly has written not a sequel but a book that triumphantly justifies the promise of his debut. A young woman, Rita Ferris, and her little son die at the hands of an unknown killer, and the past and the present collide violently for Parker. Still raw from the brutal slaying of his wife and daughter, and the events surrounding the hunt for their killer, The Travelling Man,’ Parker has retreated to the wintry Maine landscapes of his youth. But his return reawakens the ghosts of the past, forcing him to join the hunt for Billy Purdue, Rita’s ex-husband and the chief suspect in the slayings. As the death toll mounts, it becomes clear that someone else is also hunting for Billy Purdue, someone who seems to know Parker almost as well as he knows himself, and that the true answer to the puzzle lies thirty years in the past, in a tree with strange fruit, in the troubled history of his own grandfather, and in the violent origins of a mythical killer, the monster known as ‘Caleb Kyle.’

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City Lives by Patricia Scanlan
‘Devlin Delaney’s hands shook as she took the slim want from its packet. In a few minutes she’d know if her dearest wish was to be granted. To be pregnant with Luke’s baby would make her happy beyond belief.’ Devlin, Caroline and Maggie: women in their prime. They have it all: careers, success, marriage. They are the envy of their peers. But at what price? Just when Devlin has everything she has ever dreamed of, a callous betrayal shows her that there’s no room for friendship and loyalty in business. Can she be as tough as she needs to be in a world of deceit and double-dealing, where honesty and integrity are rare commodities? Caroline, fed up with being a victim, is no longer shy, unsure and needy. She’s about to take a step that will change her life. Then tragedy strikes, and her plans change completely. But when one door closes another opens. And Maggie, alone, unsupported, and unhappy in her marriage, has to make a choice that will put her children’s needs before her own. Has she the strength to do what she has to do? This novel is the story of three women who have one great certainty in their lives: their friendship. The enduring bonds of loyalty and love will carry then through the worst of times and the best of times.

James Dillon: A Biography by Maurice Manning
This book fills a significant gap in the recent political history of Ireland. It adds considerably to our understanding of how the State’s institutions and political system became defined after independence. It examines, from a hitherto unexplored perspective, how the process of parliamentary opposition operated in the new democracy which was the Irish Free State and, later, the Republic of Ireland. Indeed, one of the reasons why this book is to be welcomed is that its subject, James Dillon, has never heretofore been the focus of comparable scholarly scrutiny. The book is a valuable and original chronicle, from a unique perspective, of Ireland in formative, difficult and challenging times. It is an Ireland that is scarcely recognisable today. This is the story of a public man in the best and most complete sense of the word a man without whose commitment to public service, Irish democracy might not be the robust and secure organism which it now is.

Dead as Doornails by Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin’s classic account of life in post-war literary Dublin is as funny and colourful as one would expect from an intimate of Bredan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Brian O’Nolan (Myles na Gopaleen); but it is also a clear-eyes, astringent antidote to what passes for literary history and memory in the Dublin of today. Cronin writes with remarkable subtlety of the frustrations and pathologies of this generation: the excess of drink, the shortage of sex, the insecurity and begrudgery, the painful limitations of cultural life, and the bittersweet pull of exile. The generation chronicled by Cronin was one wasted promise. That waste is redressed through the extraordinary prose of this classic work which has earned its place in Irish literary history.

Conversations with James Joyce by Arthur Power
This is the first paperback edition of this unique and fascinating account of the author’s friendship with James Joyce during the 1920s. Power, a young Irishman working as an art critic in Paris, first met Joyce in a Montparnasse dancehall, and the two men maintained a prickly friendship for several years. Power re-creates his conversations with the master, on a remarkable range of topics, literary and otherwise. We read of Joyce’s thoughts on writers past and present: Synge, Ibsen, Hardy, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Checkov, Dostoevsky, Gide, Proust, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson and Shakespeare. Joyce also speaks of the looming might of America and of his own work.

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The Keeper of Absalom’s Island by Tom Nestor
For Tom Nestor childhood was a soaring adventure across a rural landscape. With no place for him on the land or affinity with its toils he resolved to escape. With his pack of dogs he strides off into the green and carefree world of a curious boy in a magical time. Set in the countryside around Rathkeale in County Limerick, not twenty miles from the poverty stricken lanes and ashes of Limerick city, this memoir is peopled with such characters as the mad aristocratic Absalom Creagh, and Miss James and Miss Abigal who taught through the medium of religion and terror. On the road to Rathkeale you pass manor houses, palatine homesteads and grass mounds where houses once stood. The miracle of radio opens a new world Athlone, Hilversum, Luxembourg, the Goons and the Singing Cowboy. His escapism has set the boy at odds with his father. As the idea of leaving for boarding school fills him with dread he tries to heal the breach but fails.

The Family Business by Adrian Kenny
This novel is many things: a journal of a frustrated young writer and lover; a portrait of bohemian social life in 1970s Dublin; an intimate history of the rising Catholic middle class and of a family in flux. The author writes autobiography with the eye and ear of a novelist, evoking a time, a place and a welter of emotions through vividly remembered scenes, snippets of dialogue, small epiphanies. Unlike most memoirs, which place so much weight on the act of remembering itself, and are thus more about the writer’s present than his past, this book has the immediacy of a diary, and an almost excruciating honesty. It is, above all, an extraordinarily accomplished piece of writing.

Angel Face: A Memoir by Sheila Connolly Danzinger
Sheila Connolly was born in County Kildare in 1930, a member of a large family that suffered from the poverty and deprivation that were common at that time in Ireland. She emigrated to America in 1946 and after working at various jobs, she turned to modelling and become Pond’s Angel Face by the time she was twenty. She entered the movie industry and married producer and war hero Harry lee Danzinger, later divorcing him to marry Hollywood heart-throb Guy Madison (Wild Bill Hickock), with whom she had three children. Her third husband was producer Robert Dowdell, but Harry Danzinger wooed her back. On a trip to Ireland he bought her the aristocratic Bert house near Athy in County Kildare, formerly home to the Duke of Leinster, a house that she used to cycle past on her way to school, wondering if she could ever aspire to a position as kitchenmaid there. Fresh and captivating, this memoir is a fascinating account of one woman’s extraordinary life.

Peadar O’Donnell by Peter Hegarty
Peadar O’Donnell, writer and socialist, was born in Meenmore in west Donegal and educated at St. Patrick’s Teacher Training College in Dublin. He became a teacher and union organiser, motivated by his personal knowledge of the appalling conditions endured by migrant workers in Scotland. He took the Republican side in the Civil War of 1922-23, recording his experiences in ‘The Gates Flew Open’ and edited the IRA paper from 1926 29. His agitation against land annuities brought down the Cosgrave Cumann na nGaedheal government. He recruited for the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 he founded The Bell and took over as editor when Sean O’Faolain retired. All six of his novels are set in west Donegal, which he knew from boyhood and where he taught. For most of his ninety-three years he was a fighter who stood for social justice. This new biography depicts him as one of the most influential shapers of modern Ireland, through both politics and literature.

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No Tears in Ireland by Sylvia Couturie
In August 1939, Sylvia and Marguerite Couturie, with their Irish governess, arrived in Ireland for a holiday. The plan was that they would be joined by their parents and would return with them to France. But the outbreak of war and the occupation of France by the Germans changed everything. It became impossible for them to return. Sylvia, the eldest, was eleven years old when the war began and she heard Winston Churchill broadcast. She vowed, as her contribution to the war effort, never to shed a tear while the war lasted. In this book she chronicles the vicissitudes of life as an ‘alien’ in a foreign land and the pain and anguish of all ‘the children of war.’

Black Cat in the Window by Liam O Murchu
Born in a fourth-floor tenement, the youngest of twelve, Liam was the son of a Dublin Fusilier and a flaxmill worker. Although half his siblings were dead before he was born he does not ‘look back in anger’ but at people’s tough resolve not to be bitter about life’s lot and see the next generation through to better times. Set in the territory of Frank O’Connor on Cork’s northside, this is not another sorry tale of childhood poverty. It is a memoir of courage and endurance telling an often uproarious and always poignant story. Alive with the yowling of cats and scurrying of rats, the ghosts of Blarney and Shandon Street appear ex-soldiers, money lenders, fruit-sellers, and women overwhelmed by children, drink and galloping consumption.

Charles Dickens’s Ireland: An Anthology edited by Jim Cooke
As a young boy Charles Dickens would climb with his sister onto the dining table and sing some of Tom Moore’s ‘Irish Melodies’, songs which are interspersed in all his novels. And as a young parliamentary reporter he recorded Daniel O’Connell and they retained a certain mutual admiration throughout their lives. Dickens had many Irish friends and visited Ireland himself in 1858, 1867 and 1869. He sent out many letters from Dublin and elsewhere describing his Irish triumphs. He was hailed with delight everywhere he went. This Irish tribute records the glory of Dickens in Ireland and this book recreates the world of that bygone, but still remembered, age.

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