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Books Ireland (Summer 2002): Review Interviews Shirley Kelly, ‘The ambition to write a poem is enough to kill it’, interview with Richard Murphy, in Books Ireland, Summer 2002, pp.151. The kick of the title was administered by Murphy to an octogenarian Aunt Bella, on being urged to offer polite good-bye; another administered to him under the table by Sylvia Plaith while dining with Ted Hughes in Murphy’s house, and the third adminstered to him by a grandson in S. Africa. Encouraged by Dennis O’Driscoll to write his life in 1924 when he read his notes, kept since the age of forty; gf. a teacher in Carlow village, became maor of Colombo in Ceylon; his mother had an Anglo-Irish pedigree that included Charles II, William the Conqueror and Geoffrey Chaucer; b. Milford, his maternal grandparents’ estate; lived in Ceylon to eight; briefly in Connemara in 1935 with siblings (incl. br. Christopher) on his father’s return; ed. Baymount Castle, Dubloin, and as chorister at Canterbury Cath. Choir School; discovered writing ‘as a way of expressing emotion’ in letters home; proceeded to Wellington; rebel against military ethos; immersed in Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare; studied at Oxford under C. S. Lewis; rejected academia in favour of poetry; ‘All my thinking and reading was tending towards that conclusion. It seemd to me at the time that a poet was the greatest thing you could be. There was an assumption, to my mind erroneous, that poetry was higher art form than prose, and also it seemed ot me the most difficult thing to do. I relished the challenge.’ Returned to Ireland after two years in Oxford; ‘became convinced with religious intensity that the poetry he wanted to write would be written in Connemara’; settled in derelict cottage beneath a waterfall, November; threatened with consignment to Ballinasloe Mental Asylum by his mother, then in the Bahamas with his father, who was serving as Governor; completed his degree (second class) and joined his family, working as his father’s personal assistant. Murphy speaks of his father’s alarm and disappointment at his career choice and writes, ‘to be honest I suppose there was an underlying assumption on my part that I could always be rescued if things didn’t work out’. Parents retired to Rhodesia a year later; Murphy reviewed poetry for the Spectator; winner of AE Memorial Award, 1951; studied French civilisation at the Sorbonnne on a small allowance from his father; met Patricia Avis, dg. of S. Africa businessman; Avis subsidised the publication of his first collection from Dolmen (The Archaeology of Love, 1955); purchased Ernest Gébler’s house in Wicklow, where he started farming; Emily b. 1956; divorced 1957; settled in Connemara with Emily, 1957; developed reputation as ‘laureate of Protestant gentry’; restored Galway hooker; offered trips to tourists and entertained poets in the winter, incl. Theodore Roethke, Plaith and Hughes, then living nearby by with Assia Wevill at Roundstone; took temporary place at Colgate Univ., through good offices of John McGahern, 1971; subsequently taught at Bard College, Iowa Univ., Virginia and Syracuse’ left West of Ireland following the death of a close friend in 1976; Mirror Wall inspired by return to Shri Lanka in mid-eithies; arranged from a number of young Sri Lankans to receive third-level ed. in Ireland; ‘extended familyu of Sir Lankan protegés living and prospering in Dublin’ (Kelly); divides time between S. Africa, where Emily lives with two children, and home in Leixlip; hasn’t written any poetry for years. Books reviewed
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Rory Brennan, review of Richard Kell, Collected Poems, intro. Fred Johnston (Belfast: Lagan Press), 246pp., in Books Ireland, Summer 2002, p.157. Son a the manse (methodist missioner and minister); ed. Belfast and TCD. Brennan writes, ‘disillusion is one of the key tones [sic] in Kell’s oeuvre. But is no facile or repetitive disillusion … Rather it is an intelligent, almost researched, anticipated, stoic disillusoin with whih Kell faces the pleastures and punishments of love, inexorable physical decline, the drifting seasons, the death of those deeply loved. (p.157.) Michael Smith, trans. Federico Garcia Lorca, The Tamarit Poems (Dublin: Dedalus Press), 68pp. Maurice Scully, Postlude (Wicklow: Wild Honey Press), 32pp. [bound and sewn chapbook]; Tom French, Touching the Bones (Oldcastle: Gallery Press), 72pp. [‘in the Kavnagh-Montague-Heaney tradition of raw rural reminiscence’, acc. Brennan] Gerald Dawe & Michael Mulreany, eds., The Ogham Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Ireland, Intro. Brian Farrell (IPA), 240pp., 8 b&w photos. [Michael Johnston on his father’s house on Lansdowne Rd., Dublin - where the runic stone of the title stood; also essay on Markey Robinson (1918-99) by Mulreany; David Wheatley on J. C. Mangan; David Norris, Fintan O’Toole, Brendan Kennelly, Thomas Kinsella. Dermot Bolger, The Reed Bed (Oldcastle: Gallery Press), 78pp. Niall MacMonagle, Slow Time: 100 Poems to take You There (Dublin: Marino), 192pp. John Moriarty, Notes: An Autobiography (Dublin: Lilliput Press), 710pp.; author spent time as boarding school teacher in N. Staffordshire; later at univ. in Manitoba; SF in the sixties … [&c.]; deems that ‘Buddhism is pleasant to look at … whereas Christianity is horrible to look at’ (reviewed by Kevin Kiely, Books Ireland, Summer 2002, p.160.) Thomas K. Carroll, Wisdom and Wasteland: Jeremy Taylor in his Prose and Preaching (Dublin: Four Courts Press), 288pp. Taylor died in Ireland as bishop of Connor and Down in 1667. Bridget O’Toole, appreciatively reviewing Lis Christensen’s Bowen: The Later Fiction, writes that ‘[p]art of th eoddness of The Little Girls comes from Bowen’s experiment in presenting her characters only through externals, not telling how they thing and feel. The decision is reported by Spencer Curtis Brown and quoted here by Christensen. Leland Bardwell, Mother to a Stranger (Belfast: Blackstaff Press), 192pp., in which a contented middle age couple are confronted by the undisclosed early child of the wife, come back in his thrirties in search of his birth-mother. (Sue Leonard, review, Books Ireland, Summer 2002, p.165; Bardwell, b. 1928; Leonard writes with some indignation at the publisher’s promise of an ‘exceptional novel about the devastating power of secrets’: ‘If only Leland had made a plan … Leland has already published four novels, so should surely understand her craft by now? It’s not that she can’t write. There is some poetic thoughtful writing in the novel, but it gers drowned in the torrent of half-formed ideas and morass of four-letter words.’ Frederick Burton’s engraving of Thomas Davis is almost certainly based on a daguerretype of the 1840s. James Murphy on Hitler and Mussolini (Athol Books), 200pp. Murphy was born in Bandon (1880-1946) and worked for the German propaganda ministry in 1934-39, returning to London to trans. Mein Kampf; d. Bishop Stortford; held of the Nazis that ‘they will continue to destroy … until we show signs of giving in or else are strong enough to strike down the destructive arm.’ Yeats is Dead contribs. incl. Roddy Doyle, Frank McCourt, Pauline McLynne, Gerard Stembridge, Anthony Cronin, Gina Moxley [play tag relievio] Thomas Kilroy, Ghosts (Oldcastle: Gallery Press), transposition of Ibsen to Irish town; also The Great Hunger [and] The Gallant John-Joe (Dublin: Lilliput Press), 90pp.; the latter dealing with John -Joe Concannon, Irish bogman woefully out of step with his daughter daughter Jacinta IAP Books listed
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