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Saturday, November 17, 2007
Read Ireland
Read Ireland Book Reviews – Issue 398 – Irish Fiction and Poetry
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Contents:
1. The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black (aka John Banville)
2. This Year It Will be Different by Maeve Binchy
3. Foolish Mortals by Jennifer Johnston
4. Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne
5. Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon
6. New and Selected Poems by Pat Boran
7. The Company of Horses by Peter Fallon
8. Out of Breath by Eamon Grennan
9. The Fifty Minute Mermaid by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, translated
from the Irish by Paul Muldoon
10. Snow Negatives by Enda Coyle-Greene
11. The Poetry of Derek Mahon by Hugh Haughton
12. Somewhere the Wave new poems by Derek Mahon
13. District and Circle by Seamus Heaney
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1. The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black (aka John Banville)
(Trade Paperback; 15 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 342 pages)
Time has moved on for Quirke, the world-weary Dublin pathologist
first encountered in Christine Falls. It is the middle of the
1950s, that low, dishonourable decade; a woman he loved has
died, a man whom he once admired is dying, while the daughter he
for so long denied is still finding it hard to accept him as her
father. When Billy Hunt, an acquaintance from college days,
approaches him about his wife's apparent suicide, Quirke
recognises trouble but, as always, trouble is something he
cannot resist. Slowly he is drawn into a twilight world of drug
addiction, sexual obsession, blackmail and murder, a world in
which even the redoubtable Inspector Hackett can offer him few
directions. (Also available in hardback, priced at 25 Euro)
Also, Signed First Editions First Printing Hardback available at
40 Euro.
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2. This Year It Will be Different by Maeve Binchy
(Hardback; Publishers Recommended Price: 28 Euro. Read Ireland
Special Price: 23 Euro / 32 USD / 16 UK; 260 pages)
Filled with Maeve Binchy's trademark wit and true storytelling
genius, THIS YEAR IT WILL BE DIFFERENT powerfully evokes the
lives of of wives, husbands, children, friends and lovers, all
set during the one holiday when feelings cannot easily be
hidden. There are step-families grappling with exes;
long-married couples faced with in-law problems; a wandering
husband choosing between the other woman and his wife; a child
caught up in a grown-up tug-of-war...The festive season may be
magical, but it can also be a time of family difficulties, a
time to reflect on relationships; a time of change.
------------------------------------
3. Foolish Mortals by Jennifer Johnston
(Hardback; 20 Euro / 29 USD / 14 UK; 250 pages)
All families are complicated, but some are more complicated than
others. And Christmas can only make matters worse. After Ciara's
estranged father is nearly killed by his second wife in a car
accident - or was it an accident? Ciara begins, gingerly, to
reenter his life. As her troubled family gather for the
holidays, is it too much to hope that they begin to find peace
at last? Of course it is. With cross-dressing twins, new loves
and an unpredictably monstrous matriarch, Christmas was never
going to be easy. But it proves both more disastrous and happier
than any of them could have guessed.
---------------------------------
4. Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne
(Trade Paperback; 14 Euro / 19 USD / 10 UK; 400 pages)
Twenty-first-century Dublin was chic, seductive, and affluent.
At the glittering heart of the city is Anna Kelly Sweeney, a
moderately successful writer, who lives in exclusive south
Dublin with her wealthy property developer husband Alex and her
son Rory. Thus insulated from harsh and unpleasant realities,
Anna's life is spent in the endless round of launches, lunches
and opening nights that makes up the city's literary scene. But
Anna is not happy. Sensing the emptiness of her existence, she
falls for the handsome but irresponsible Vincy and prepares to
abandon home, husband and son for the dream of an all-conquering
love. Anna's life is in crisis, and as events unfold, her sense
of herself as both a woman and a writer is shattered.
Self-consciously echoing and drawing on Tolstoy's Anna Karenina,
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's ambitious new novel uses the story of Anna as
a critique of Irish society in the twenty-first century. Set
largely in Dublin and Kerry, Ni Dhuibhne weaves Anna's story
together with that of Leo, Kate, Gerry and a cast of other
characters, to create a rich tapestry, a web of stories through
which to explore, amongst other things, family and marriage, the
materialism of Irish society and culture, the relationship
between the urban and the rural, the role of the writer and of
writing, and the search for purpose, meaning and spirituality in
modern Irish life. Panoramic, strikingly original and
compulsively readable, "Anna Kelly Sweeney" is a modern-day
morality tale, an intelligent, funny, critical but always
fiercely humane insight into contemporary Irish culture and
society.
---------------------------------
5. Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon
(Paperback with endflaps; Publishers Recommended Price: 16 Euro,
Read Ireland Price: 13 Euro / 20 USD / 10 UK; 108 pages)
The horse latitudes designate an area north and south of the
equator in which ships tend to be becalmed, in which stasis if
not stagnation is the order of the day, and where sailors
traditionally threw horses overboard to conserve food and water.
From Bosworth Field to Beijing, the Boyne to Bull Run, from a
series of text messages to the nineteenth-century Irish poet Tom
Moore to an elegy for musician Warren Zevon, and from
post-Agreement Ireland to George W. Bush's America, Paul
Muldoon's tenth collection of poetry presents us with fields of
battle and fields of debate, in which we often seem to have come
to a standstill, but where language that has been debased may yet
be restruck and made current to our predicament.
Horse Latitudes engages the public sphere on equal terms with
the most private and fugitive materials - 'the fifty years I've
spent trying to put it together' - all within the same vigilant
optic, in a language of inspired happenstance which, as ever,
combines radical uncertainties of perspective with a lyrical
lucidity. ( I have one first edition first printing hardback of
this book left in stock, priced at 40 Euro. I also have another
hardback copy, but not a first edition, priced at 20 Euro.)
------------------------------------
6. New and Selected Poems by Pat Boran
(Paperback; 16 Euro / 25 USD / 12 UK; 230 pages)
First published in 2005, New and Selected Poems by Pat Boran
presents a large selection of work by one of the best-known of
the younger Irish poets. Introduced by Dennis O'Driscoll, for
whom Boran is "a poet of mystery and fulfilment, of the eternal
and numinous no less than the earthly and the everyday", New and
Selected Poems features work from all of his earlier publications
as well as a selection of newer work. "Pat Boran's poems make
magic out of found things, and his metaphors light the dark like
Roman candles. He is a master of his language; beyond that, he
makes poetry matter to me again." -Gerard Donovan (author of
Schopenhauer's Telescope and Doctor Salt) PAT BORAN was born in
Portlaoise in 1963 and now lives in Dublin where he is publisher
of the Dedalus Press and presenter of The Poetry Programme on RTÉ
Radio 1. Since receiving the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in
1989, he has pub-lished four widely-praised collections, The
Unwound Clock (1990), Familiar Things (1993), The Shape of Water
(1996) and As the Hand, the Glove (2001), as well as works of
fiction and non-fiction including the popular writers' handbook,
The Portable Creative Writing Workshop (1999/2005), and the Bisto
Book of the Year shortlisted children's title, All the Way from
China (1998). Volumes of his poetry have appeared in Hungarian,
Macedonian and Italian, and are currently in preparation in
other languages. In 2007 he was elected to membership of
Aosdána, the Irish academy of artists. (Also available in
Hardback, priced at 25 Euro).
------------------------------------
7. The Company of Horses by Peter Fallon
(Paperback; 12 Euro / 18 USD / 9 UK; 64 pages)
"The Company of Horses" is Peter Fallon's first collection of
new poems since "News of the World: Selected and New Poems" was
published in 1998. "The Georgics of Virgil" appeared in 2004 and
has since been reissued by Oxford in its "World's Classics
Series". According to the "Irish Times", that book 'taken in
parts or as a whole says "Glory to the World". And the glory is
renewed for our time in Peter Fallon's translation.These new
poems - closely observed and patiently assembled - continue that
celebration and amplify that verdict. A book of uncommon empathy
('One World' registers the gentle effect of a tsunami on the
coast of Ireland), it counts the blessings of the whole green
force of nature. There are hymns to trees and other living
creatures - a pine marten and riding horses, the persistence of
seabirds and starlings. Inevitable elegiac notes are woven into
riffs of a collection that highlights beginnings and beginnings
again. These life-affirming lyrics manage to remain attentive to
particular, cherished places - the author's Irish midlands home
and a western retreat - while they assert common ground in the
heart's affections and excitements. (Also available in Hardback,
priced at 18.50 Euro)
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8. Out of Breath by Eamon Grennan
(Paperback; 12 Euro / 18 USD / 9 UK; 80 pages)
The poems in Eamon Grennan's vivid new collection demonstrate
once again his fidelity to "these light morsels/of the ordinary"
from which he draws large, thought-provoking implications.
Preoccupied with process he finds in breath itself an image for
all that generates excitement, agitation, celebration, and
elegy. These richly voiced poems explore both minute and major
issues and nudge us in their own concentrated way towards
revelations that alter, however slightly, the way we understand
this various world. (Also available in Hardback, priced at 18.50
Euro).
----------------------------------
9. The Fifty Minute Mermaid by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, translated
from the Irish by Paul Muldoon
(Trade Paperback; 14 Euro / 22 USD / 11 UK; 164 pages)
This extravaganza of marvellous tales conjures a biography of
mermaids and, in patterns of sometimes startling sounds and
images, traces the fate of their race. It follows the paths and
portals to another world, Land-Under-Wave, the realm of myth,
imagination and the psyche. It is a book in touch and tune with
the wellsprings of poetry.
Neither ‘believing nor disbelieving’, sometimes insouciant and
always wideranging, The Fifty Minute Mermaid is a book of
accumulating force and subtle consonance. Paul Muldoon’s
generous surrender to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems supports José
Saramago’s adage that the author with his or her language
creates a national literature. World literature is created by
translators. (also available in hardback, priced at 20 Euro)
------------------------------------
10. Snow Negatives by Enda Coyle-Greene
(Trade Paperback; 12 Euro / 18 USD / 9 UK; 76 pages)
Enda Coyle-Greene's Snow Negatives is an exciting debut from an
Irish poet whose work is already well known from literary
magazines and journals. In poems that are at once formally alert
and alive to the possibilities of new departure, Coyle-Greene
records outward journeys and experiences, but always measured
against a time when "the slow ash of innocence clung / to the
cigarettes we smoked / behind the bicycle sheds" ('Witches'),
and, increasingly, the awareness of mortality and the "eerily
familiar" recognitions occasioned by merely going home.
-------------------------------------
11. The Poetry of Derek Mahon by Hugh Haughton
Hardback; 45 Euro / 60 USD / 30 UK; 400 pages
Derek Mahon is one of the leading poets of his time, both in
Ireland and beyond, famously offering a perspective that is
displaced from as much as grounded in his native country. From
prodigious beginnings to prolific maturity, he has been, through
thick and thin, through troubled times and other, a writer
profoundly committed to the art of poetry and the craft of
making verse. He has also been no-less a committed reviser of
his work, believing the poem to be more than a record in verse,
but a work of art never finished. This virtuoso study by Hugh
Haughton provides the most comprehensive account imaginable of
Mahon's oeuvre. Haughton's brilliant writing always serves and
illuminates the poetry, yielding extraordinary insights on
almost every page. The poetry, its revisions and reception, are
the subject here, but so thorough is the approach that what is
offered also amounts indirectly to an intellectual biography of
the poet and with it an account of Northern Irish poetry vital
to our understanding of the times.
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Special Limited Edition:
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12. Somewhere the Wave new poems by Derek Mahon
36pp Hardback Publication date: 29 November 2007
(120 Euro / 170 USD / 85 UK - Price to increase to 150 Euro on
1st December)
with drawings and watercolours by Bernadette Kiely
Ten new poems – one of Derek Mahon’s ‘interim’ collections –
conjure the world of Coleridge’s life, Brian Moore’s Belfast and
the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov. They range from Italy to Goa to
the American South. With the formal art of a master, they are
sure to delight the author’s admirers.
This handsome edition features pencil drawings and full colour
reproductions of watercolours by Bernadette Kiely specially
created in response to this new work.
500 copies are numbered and signed by the author. 450 copies
only are for sale. Printed on Rives Artist and hardbound in
linen with blind embossed title and in a Pergamenata wraparound.
Somewhere the Wave is the second title in a new series. The
first, The Riverbank Field by Seamus Heaney (and Martin Gale),
was oversubscribed on publication. This book will be an instant
collectors’ item and significantly increase in value.
------------------------------------------
13. District and Circle by Seamus Heaney
(Paperback; Publishers Recommended Price: 14 Euro; Read Ireland
Book Review Special Price 11 Euro / 14 USD / 8 UK; 80 pages)
Seamus Heaney's new collection starts 'in an age of bare hands
and cast iron' and ends 'as the automatic lock/clunks shut' in
the eerie new conditions of a menaced twentieth-first century.
In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the
weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the
memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of
World War II - railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the 'heavyweight
silence' of cattle out in rain - are coloured by a strongly
contemporary sense that 'anything can happen' and other images
from the dangerous present - a journey on the underground, a
melting glacier - are fraught with this same anxiety. But
"District and Circle", which includes a number of prose poems
and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his
staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of
love and excited language. In a sequence like "The Tollund Man
in Springtime" and in several poems which 'do the rounds of the
district' - its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar
and unfamiliar ghosts - the gravity of memorial is transformed
into the grace of recollection. With more relish and conviction
than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of
workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.
This new collection was initially published by Faber in hardback
on 6th April 2006. It was Heaney’s first new collection for five
years, and without doubt one of the publishing highlights of
2006.
I have a few rare and increasingly valuable first editions left
in stock. They are now priced at 50 Euro each (They have more
than doubled in value since publicationl and are likely to
continue to increase in value now that the paperback has been
released. The US edition was published some six weeks after the
UK, so these are ‘True’ Firsts!
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