Interview-review of Tony Jordan’s W. B. Yeats: Vain, Glorious, Lout (Westport Books), a ‘plain-speaking and less than flattering perspective’; Yeats “felt nothing” at the death of his mother and reluctantly agreed to share cost of plaque; resisted Lollie’s teacher-training plans and warned that higher education turned women into “loud chatterers”; makes much of influence of Neitazche, recommended to Yeats by John Quinn in 1902; wrote to Olivia Shakespear [here Shakespeare] urging “the despotic rule of the educated classes as the only end of the ocuntry’s troubles”; appeared at Kildare St. Club in blue shirt in support of early fascism; quotes anecdote of Sir Ian Hamilton, a cousin of Lady Gregory and a soldier, who met Hitler and recorded his reactions: ‘Where ever have I heard someone speak like this? Who could it have been? Then suddenly, as he spoke of his nightingales, the mirror of memory flashed and there I was listening again to Yeats.”. (p.141.)

Interview-review with Flavia Alaya, partner of New York priest Fr. Harry Browne; published by NY Feminist Press, 2001; Harry Browne II appeared on the Marian Finucane show; published in Ireland by New Island; Browne’s MS biography of Archbishop Hughes of New York was left by him at the seminary in Yonkers and subsequently published by the Paulist Press without allusion to his authorship.

Shirley Kelly, interview with Julie Parsons; Parsons has just issued The Guilty Heart (Macmillan), the story of an eight-year-old boy who disappears while his mother is at work, his father is in bed with a neighbour and his minder is on an ecstasy trip with her boyfriend, involving issues of paedophilia; quotes: “I didn’t set out to write about paedophilia […]It wasn’t really in the headlines when I started out, but it did suggest itself as he most likely explanation for a child’s disappearance. It was the disappearance itself that interested me initially, and what that might lead to”; her parents emigrated to New Zealand in 1947; her father died at sea in a mysterious circumstances with 24 others when he travelled as a doctor to the Tokelau Islands to visit man with a gangrenous hand; boat found abandoned with its life-rafts missing but no survivors; officially presumed dead after seven years; family return to Dublin in 1963 “unbelievably traumatic”; a younger brother contracted glandular fever and spent a year hospital; an older brother was diagnosed with a congenital back problem requiring bone graft from his hip; avid reader in childhood; studied sociology at UCD; “It didn’t take me long to figure out that the social workers were all middle class and their clients were all working class and I wasn’t comfortable with that at all”; worked as artist’s model in New Orleans; took MA in sociology of music, UCD; joined RTÉ as radio producer in 1985; worked on Gay Byrne morning radio show; wrote account of her family tragedy for Sunday Miscellany in 1993; joined writers’ group with Alison Dye, Joan O’Neill and Sheila Barrett; gives account of first novel and publication: “Then it occurred to me that writing my family history was a very obvious thing to do and anyway, I’m not keen on the ‘shop your family’ school of writing. I had always enjoyed reading thrillers, I was a big fan of Ruth Rendell and I thought I’d like to be able to write a book like that. The idea for my first novel, Mary, Mary, came to me on the DART one day as I was going to work in RTE. That day we were following a group of workers around the country pushing a giant Superquinn sausage, and I thought “There must be more to life than this”. So I sat down, wrote a synopsis and showed it to my husband and a friend. They thought it was very good, so I wrote the first three chapters and sent them off with the synopsis to Treasa Coady at Townhouse. I’d met Treasa through my radio and TV work and I thought Townhouse were doing a good job with Deirdre Purcell. Treasa got my submission on a Friday and the following Monday she rang me and offered me a contract.” Rights sold on to Macmillan with contract for two further books; four best-sellers in 14 countries.

Eamonn Kelly, review of Judy Friel & Sanford Sternlicht, ed. & intro., New Plays from the Abbey Theatre, Vol 2: 1996-1998 (Syracuse UP 2001): ‘In Melonfarmer [by Alex Johnston] the city [Dublin] is revealed as a no-holds-barred embrace of nihilism in the form of drink, drugs and sexual gymnastics unfazed by gender boundaries. Amidst the revelry Sean Spence carried the ancestral memory of Catholic guilt as he tries to come to terms with the apparently easy promiscuity taking place all around him. Howver, the people don’t seem to be any happier for all the fun they appear to be having [...] Johnston’s people are funny in their troubles, the writing sharp and witty, and his play a welcome irreverent shot in the arm of the Irish stage.’ (Books Ireland, Summer 2003, p.152.) [copied].

David Annwn, Arcs Through: The Poetry of Maurice Scully, with Randolph Healy & Billy Mills (Coelancth Press [2003]), 40pp.

Sue Leonard, review of Declan Burke, Eightball Boogie (Sitric) ,248pp; journalist’s novel, centred on anti-hero Harry Rigby; compared disadvantageously with Dan Starkey in Colin Bateman (‘lovable as well as chauvinistic’): ‘In deliberately making Harry such a heartless swine, Burke forgot to make him real.’

Also, Catherine Donnelly, The State of Grace (Sitric), 256pp.; debut novel; a heartless mother in advertising begins to change: ‘as Grace becomes less self-obsessed, she realises what a bad mother she’s been. It’s a slow process, but she starts to appreciate her son, and realise that her daughter’s failure [drugs] mirrors her own’.

Also, Anita Notaro, Back after the Break (Bantam), 448pp.; set in RTÉ where Notaro works as a producer of the Late Late Show and others.

[Additional notes directly to Ricorso.]