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Books Ireland (Sept. 2001): Review Mary Stanley, interview [by Shirley Kelly], Books Ireland (Sept. 2001) ,pp.198-99. First novel Retreat, a story of give girls who experience sexual abuse by a priest; publ. by Headline; wrote for RTE Sunday Miscellany; dg. of John McCourt and Irene, creator of Argosy books, wholesaler, as commercial lending library in 1940s; ed. Miss Meredith’s; leaving cert. at 13; continued at Alexander Coll.; m. Edwin Higel, whom she met at TCD; lived in Tubingen; taught English; rescued from flooded basement in Tubingen flood, being pulled out by a window by frogmen; married and returned to Dublin, Christmas 178, working for Argosy; Edwin worked for Methuen and other UK Publishers; mgr. dir. of New Island Books; children Steffen (1980) and Sophie (1986); d. of John McCourt, 1989; breakup of marriage, 1999; Open University; writing with Rv. George Ferguson in Dundrum; infl. by Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; ‘I wanted to write a funny book about a group of girls coming of age, and the way sin which they syustain and support each other. The abuse theme crept in as something that would both damagge them and bind them together.’ (pp199). Shirley Kelly, interview with Eoin McNamee (Books Ireland, Sept. 2001), writes: ‘with Pat McCabe and Colm Tóibín, McNamee had joined a stable of pricey Irish thoroughbred being groomed for international success by Peter Straus at Picador. But while Tóibín and McCabe rose to almost iconic status during the late nineties, McNamee seemed to quit the literary scene altogether.’ Kelly quotes McNamee: ‘I believe that with Resurrection Man, I sort of wrote myself out, exhausted whatever literary resources I had,’ he says. ‘It was a long time before I could find another story that I could stick with for the duration of a novel. It’s not that I’m reluctant to start a new novel, it’s just that if I’m writing without conviction I run out of steam after about twenty pages. But I never stopped writing. I’ve never done anything else really’. Further, on the film of Resurrection Man: ‘The Tory press lined up to take pot-shots at this “poisonous out-pouring of anti-unionist bile” […It was effectively censored in the North it was shown on only one screen in the entire province.’ Gives account of the case of Patricia Curran: ‘So why, a little after 2 a.m., did the judge ring Patricia’s friend John Steel, who had left her at the bus station that evening, to as if he knew where she might be? And why did McConnell’s boss, Sir Richard Pim, confiscate the telephone records which would provide evidence of this discrepancy.’; further quotes, ‘I was still writing the book when Gordon’s conviction was overturned […] so I was anxious to portray him in a sympathetic light. He was clearly a scapegoat, suspected of being a homosexual at a time when this was socially unacceptable, so he was particularly vulnerable. All the evidence, the little that was available then and was subsequently uncovered, points to the Curran family, but the [201] were completely overlooked.’ Jesuit website at www.sacredspace.ie Char. in Dubliners says, ‘I once saw John MacHale and I’ll never forget it as long as I live.’ [First Flush] Denis B. Cashman kept hand written copies of the poems of John Boyle O’Reilly in his Hougoumont Diary. Fred Johnston, review of Deirdre Brennan, The Hen Party (Lapwing 2001); John F. Deane, The Hero Home (Lapwing 2001); Medbh McGuckian, Venus and the Rain (Gallery reiss. 2001) [‘revised’]; Desmond O’Grady, The Wandering Celt (Dedalus 2001) [reiss.]. Of McGuckian: questions whether the poetry is not sometimes obscure: ‘I do believe - though it may be sensibly argued that we don’t always have to know what a poem means ot enjoy it - that it quite often rambles, in love with its own sound, like someone overheard out for a walk humming a tune whose sens eone can only guess at as one passes by. Pleasing to the hummer, surely; to the listener unfathomable.’ Quotes with approva: ‘He could not leae his won voice alone;/He took it apart, he undressed it,/I suppose the way that women clear their faces,/ So that some light is still able to love them.’ Asks: ‘Do we consider McGuckian to be a sensuous poet. I think we should […]’ (p.215.) Edward M. Burns and Joshua A. Gaylord, eds., A Tour of the Darking Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen (UCD Press 2001), 738pp. Seán Tobin and Lois Tobin, eds., Lady Gregory, Autumn Gatherings: Reflections at Coole (Galway 2001), 218pp. [contribs. incl. Declan Kiberd, Lorna Reynolds, Bruce Arnold et al.] George Moore called her Kiltartanese ‘a Kiltartan three-hole whistle’; Synge told her, ‘Cuchulainn is still part of my daily bread’; Gogarty asserted, ‘the perpetual presentation of her plays nearly ruined the Abbey.’ Sean Connolly, the first volunteer to die in 1916, played the part of a rebel leader in Count Markievicz’s play The Memory of the Dead, for the Irish Repertory Co., and is saved by a patriot girl played by Helena Molony, the same who prayed over him as he lay dying. Geraldine Dillon’s diary material in the NLI includes the allegation that Grace Gifford suffered a miscarriage shortly before her wedding to Joseph Plunkett, and that Plunkett was not in any case the father. The Gifford sisters were strongly influenced in their patriotism my a Catholic nurse-maid. Alan Hayes, ed., The Years Flew By: Recollections of Madame Sidney Gifford Czira (Galway: Arlen House 2001), 104pp. [Gifford used pseud. John Brennan] Marie O’Neill, Grace Gifford Plunkett: Tragic Bride of 1916 (Dublin IAP 2000), 104pp., ill. Victoria Mary Clarke & Shane MacGowan, A Drink with Shane MacGowan (London: Sidgewick & Jackson 2001), 378pp. MacGowan calls The Pogues ‘a bunch of rowdy, out-of-it nutters playing headbanging Irish music.’ Máire Brennan, The Other Side of the Rainbow (London: Hodder & Stoughton 2001), 272pp.; successful singer; records affair with Frenchman and abortion; her sister is Enya. Christy Moore, One Voice: My Life in Song (London: Hodder & Stoughton 2001), 287pp. John Hewitt, Two Plays: The McCrackens [and] The Angry Dove, ed. Damien Smith (Belfast: Lagan Press 2001), 121pp., respectively on the United Irishmen and St. Columcille and the latter a verse play. Sean Doran, reviewing (BI Sept. 2001), remarks of the former, set in 1790s and 1845: ‘[T]he remorseless, over-optimisic and hence doom-laden spirit of the age does not come to life again in these pages; the rationality (or rationalisation) is there; but agony is not.’ Jim Nolan, The Blackwater Angel (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2001), 94pp., play concerning Valentine Greatrakes, a Cromwellian officer pensioned off with an estate in Waterford. Marina Carr, On Raftery’s Hill (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2000), 55pp.; Sean Doran, reviewing, writes: ‘The not-so grey eminence in this play is Red Raftery, a bullish man in his sixties. He dominates a half-wit son who lives on Prozac-type pills in the barn, a daughter who is about to marry a “scrubber”, another daughter who is probably both the mother and the sister of the first (the plot of the film Chinatown) and a crazed, dreaming grandmother. The language is at once unique and plausible, crude and aggressive […] There is an issue about land in relation to the forthcoming marriage, and prospective groom is ridiculed … the father … undresses his daughter by cutting her clothes off .. the action … ends with the cancellation of the marriage and the appearance of the mad granny in the wedding dress, an echo of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.’ Doran regards Carr as a playwright with ‘a grim, almost pitiless vision [who] has mapped her hinterland’, but considers it ‘one she must abandon if her workd is to grow and not stultify like her characters.’ (p.221.) Books listed
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