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Books Ireland (May 1987): Review Elizabeth Sutherland, ed., The Gold Key and the Green Life: Some Fantasies and Celtic Tales [by] George MacDonald, Fiona Macleod (London: Constable 1987). William Sharp, called ‘an absurd object’ by Lady Gregory; b. Paisley, 1855; passion for Western Highlands and oral trads. of people of north-west Scotland; eschewed ‘sterilising effect of Calvinism’ and professed himself a pagan dedicated to ‘the Green Life’; wrote, ‘don’t despise me when I say that I am in some things more a woman than a man’; Macleod emerged the psyche of William Sharp in 1893; a third personality, Wilfion, was the name given by Elizabeth, the wife of Sharp, and called by her ‘the inner and third Self that lay behind the dual expression’; William Sharp disclosed the dual identity in posthumous letter to his friends; works incl. The Washer of the Ford, based on Scottish bean nighe traditions, and Cathal of the Wood in “Annir-Choille”, called by Yeats ‘one of the most vital things written by him’; Sutherland states: ‘Fiona Macleod, who existed and yet did not exist, is the embodiment of Sharp’s mythology.’ (Review of Anne O’Connor, Books Ireland, May 1987, pp.83-84.) Aidan Higgins, ‘RTE Stills’, review of John Quinn, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl [transcript of nine interviews] (Methuen 1987); Maeve Binchy (‘affable … It is not Maeve’s way to lie stretched on the rack’): ‘I love Dalkey’; ed. ‘lovely little nursery school’ in Dun Laoghaire; others are Clare Boylan; Jennifer Johnston, Molly Keane, Mary Lavin, Polly Devlin, Joan Lingard, Dervla Murphy [so excited by Anew McMaster’s Hamlet at Lismore that she cycled round the countryside most of the night recovering]; and Edna O’Brien. Also reviews Bill Naugton, ON the Pig’s Back (OUP), Lancashire authobiography. The review is printed with. a comic self-portrait [cartoon] by Higgins as a somewhat Joycean mustachio’d gunslinger firing off. (Books Ireland, May 1987, p.85) John Pepper’s Ulster Haunbook (Appletree Press 1987). Martyn Turner, Illuminations from Early Irish History (Kilkenny: Boethius Press 1987). James Joyce Broadsheet, specialist review published 3 times a year. Kavanagh’s Yearly is a ‘Celebration of Poets and their Works’ held at Carrickmacross and Inishkeen, Co. Monaghan [since 1987]. Tom Henn, fndr. Yeats Summer School; photo of George Sandelescu, curator of Princess Grace Irish Library (Books Ireland, May 1987, p.87.) Yeats 28th summers school (8th -22nd Aug. 1987): Yves Bonnefoy and Francis Stuart on Yeats; Edward Said and Declan Kiberd on Literature and Decolonisation; Eagleton and Deane on Politics and the Poet; Gayatri Spivak and Liz Cullingford on Feminism; workshops with Mahon, James Flannery, Adrian Moynes [film]; Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill on Gaelic myth’ T. R. Whitaker on Wilde and Stoppard; Ulick O’Connor on Friel and the Northern crisis; Nina Witosek on Necro-aesthetics; George Watson on Irish Identity; Lyn Innes, Shaun Richards, David Cairns, Bob Tracy on Yeats. Contact Georgina Wynne. Con Costello, Botany Bay: The Story of the Convicts transported from Ireland to Australia 1791-1853 (Mercier 1987) [45,000 convicts chiefly in 212 ships from Dublin or the Cove, Cork] Jim O’Donnell, ed., Ireland: The Past Twenty Years - An Illustrated Chronology (IPA 1987), 136pp. Raven Arts Press Translation Series: 77 Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Peter Jankowsky and Brian Lynch (1975; enl. edn. 1987); Gerrit Achterberg, trans. by Michael O’Loughlin. Rita Kelly, stories, The Whispering Arch, at Irish stand in Hamburg; fluent German; Evelyn Conlon, My Head is Open (Attic 1987); Leland Bardwell, Different Kinds of Love (Attic). Peter Kavanagh, so-called ‘sacred-keeper’ of his Patrick’s memory who performed something of a coup for that memory last year you may have noticed, by seeing that a purchase of the poet’s memorabilia and manuscripts for UCD’s library would be seen as a kind of national crusade (what you might call a re-Patrickation), thus concentrating everyone’s mind on where the money would come from as distinct from how much that money should be / Brother Peter has discovered one of the great truths of Irish public relations: that a keeper’s (or minder’s) sacredness is assured if his public pronouncements are made as adjacent as possible to a great man’s grave. [&c.]’ (Books Ireland, May 1987, p.93.) Aidan Murphy, The Way the Money Goes (Raven 1987), second collection. Aubrey Dillon-Malone review of M. S. Power, A Darkness in the Eye (Heinemann 1987), 212pp.: ‘[…] writes with such deft assurance you’re inclined to forget, or at least forgive, the fact that you’ve been here before’; split in the IRA; internecine warfare as RUC attempt to get in on the act; ‘He writes without hoopla or prissy outrage; his heart is in the right place. He sees the IRA much as Mario Puzo saw the Mafia: as cool, intelligent professionals, not without a sense of humour.’ (Books Ireland, May 1987. p.95.) Also, Pat McCabe, Music on Clinton Street (Raven 1987): title from Cohen song; ‘in the loose symbolism of the book, Clinton Street (for which read the mesmeric freedom of the sixties) is counterpointed with the mind-spraining claustrophobia of a boarding school where two people - one a pupil, one a Junior Dean -traverse painful odysseys towards (hopefully) a kind of epiphany … the Irish clergy still entrenched in stranglehold of Civil War politics and a Dark Age morality code. ‘McCabe writes with that kind of intense conviction you find in many Northern scribes … His manner of expression is relentless and urgent, and often becomes prose poetry. Elsewhere, he tends to let it grind down into a kind of poor man’s sociology of the time. The early pages, too, would appear to be heavily derivative of Joyce […] But this is a worthwhile book’ (Ibid.) Séamus Ó Catháin & Padraig Ó Héalaí, The Heroic Process: Form, Function & Fantasy in Folk Epic (Glendale Press 1987), 650pp. cover ill by Louis le Brocquy [the warp spasm]. Benedict Kiely, A Letter to Peachtree and Nine Other Stories (Gollancz 1987); Mary Leland, The Little Galloway Girls (Hamish Hamilton); Malcolm Lynch, They Fly Forgotten( Constable), are reviewed by John Dunne (Books Ireland, May 1987, p.96f.) John Dunne, reviewing Carmincross, in Books Ireland (May 1987), ‘one of the most overrated Irish books of recent years’; ‘gives full rein [her] to his own special brand of galloping garrulity … one eye on the transatlantic market … cast in the form of a letter home form an American academic (in which he recounts his exploits with Brinsley McNamara, and a motley crew of rollicking Irish men and women), it carries so much allusive baggage that, less than halfway through, it collapses under the strain. / But there is great stuff here […]’; cited “Mock Battle”; “Bloodless Byrne of a Monday” and “Through the Fields in Gloves”. Expresses disappointment at Leland’s new collection; cites “Epiphany”, “Passing the Curragh”, “Just Fine”, “Truth”, “From the Mainland” and calls the characters ‘a fairly lifeless group of authorial mouthpieces’ on such subjects as broken marriages, the responsibility of children, new relationships. (Dunne, p.96f.) Ed Molony and Andrew Pollack, Paisley (Poolbeg); Steve Bruce, God Save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism (Clarendon); review by Austen Morgan: notes that two doctoral theses on Paisley have been accepted by QUB; Paisley son of Tyrone Baptist preacher and Scottish governness working in Lurgan; received ‘call’ at 16; minister of East Belfast mission, 1946; fnd. Free Pres. [1951], in protest against the ‘apostasy’ of Ulster’s largest Protestant church; imprisoned 1966 after demonstration outside Pres. Gen. Assembly, Belfast; church on Ravenhill Rd. called Martyrs Memorial; entered politics in 1969; elected for Bannside, 1970; MP N. Antrim at Westminster; fnd. Democratic Unionsts, 1971; elected to European Parl., 1979; Maura Lyons ‘rescued’ from Rome by Paisley in the 1950s. (Books Ireland, May 1987, p.97.) Kevin Condon, CM, The Missionary College of All Hallows 1842-1891 (All Hallows 1987); Joseph Dunn, No Tigers in Africa! Recollections and Reflections of 25 Years of Radharc (Dublin: Columba Press 1987). Conleth Ellis, Review [Paulin, Rosenstock, Jeffares, Scully, Tony Curtis, all Books Ireland, May 1987, p.100]: Gabriel Rosenstock, Rún na gCaisléan (Taibhse), ‘at his beset when concentrating on music, when marrying the music of ideas to the music of words .. at his worst when pursuing abstractions and infinities in to the shadow-land of banality and returning to dress the trite in the gorgeous garments of revelation.’; one third Arabic translations. Maurice Scully, Paper Token (Coelacanth Press), pamph.: “Paper Token” the least experimental [is] a poem that concerns itself with ‘the name of the noise of the train’, with Sumerian pictographs and their associated variously-shaped tokens, and with the way in which ‘images/of the tokens/supplanted/the tokens/themselves’; remarks, ‘Scully’s esoteric constructs have few visible means of support. When not self-regarding, they can be compelling, especially in their strikingly etched images, often starkly silhouetted against profound and resonant darkness.’ Derry Jeffery, Brought Up in Dublin (Colin Smith): ‘lacks cogency, lacks urgency … considerable skill and dexterity … doggedly determined to conceal the heart of the matter’; ‘His best poems are not the autobiographical sub-Betjeman ones which dominate the collection but those which take some famous Irish personages of the past as their subject matter.’ Tom Paulin, The Strange Museum (Faber), rep.; Ellis writes, ‘for me, it brings back with painful clarity the Sixties I languished through in a Belfast where nothing was swinging but the pendulum against sanity. Paulin continually underlines how there is not getting away - distancing, yes, but no severing of the bonds - from that lost city’s meanness. Tony Curtis: first collection, ‘auspicious entry’; uncompromising in its obsession with bicycles and cyclists […] rocks and stones’; ‘a peculiar way of seeing things and a most novel way of expressing them’; ‘His poems - often seemingly autobiographical and sustained by a strong narrative thread not always far from fantasy - are anything but derivative’. John Hanratty, rev. of Seamus Deane, Irish Writers 1886-1986 [Irish Heritage Series] (Eason), ill.; Celtic Revivals (Faber & Faber); Richard Ellmann, Four Dubliners (Hamish Hamilton): all Books Ireland, May 1987, pp.100f. ‘Deane writes cogently and convincingly on the roots of the Revival at the end of the nineteenth century. These are seen to lie in Edmund Burke’s cultural conservatism, in Matthew Arnold’s Celtic Liberalism, and in the broad phenomenon of European Romanticism. The author demonstrates how, by imperceptible degrees, Celticism became Gaelicism and Romanticism became nationalism. They links between art and politics, forged by the Young Ireland movement and exemplified by Mangan’s poetry, continued to work through Yeats’s cultural nationalism […] to Joyce’s eventual annexation of Irish history and politics for fictive ends, the ultimate repudiation of the Young Irelanders’ use of literary forms for the purposes of political propaganda.’ (Hanratty, p.101); quotes: ‘Joyce’s Dublin was, after all, a carefully composed image of squalor and the “naturalism” of his rendering of the city claims our assent because it is so unflinching in the face of all that is mean and unpleasant’ (p.93); whereas Yeats did indeed give up … “the deliberate creation of a kind of Holy City of the imagination” .. Joyce remained faithful to the original conception of the Revival. His Dublin became the Holy City of which Yeats had despaired.’ (p.96; here 101.) Books Listed [Copied to Datasets 19/02/02 BS]
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