Search results for ""IRISH PAGES""

A week-to-view diary, this elegant and practical publication gathers extracts from twenty years of outstanding writing from Irish Pages (the island’s premier literary journal) and The Irish Pages Press (“British Book Award Small Press of the Year 2022, Island of Ireland”).With an array of distinguished Irish and international authors, The Irish Pages Diary 2024 is an essential holiday gift for readers, writers, and anyone interested in the life of the mind and the state of the world. The Diary features classic texts by celebrated authors such as Seamus Heaney, Kathleen Jamie, Susan Sontag, Patricia Craig, Slavenka Drakulić, Julia Kristeva and Chinua Achebe, as well as the remarkable work of emerging writers living in Ireland. The Diary includes quotations in English, Scots, Scots Gaelic and Irish, highlighting the linguistic range across Ireland and Britain. Offering illuminating insights throughout the year, the Diary pairs literary passages with corresponding holidays, historical anniversaries and elegant illustrations. Irish Pages and its authors inhabit “the space outside” the Pale of the Received – business-as-usual in all its (especially Western) forms: literary, intellectual, cultural, social, political. The Diary celebrates this emphasis on original imaginative engagement with the world and its dilemmas, and is intended especially for all those readers for whom ethical issues count. Similar to the Faber & Faber Poetry Diary, The LRB Diary or The Redstone Diary, The Irish Pages Diary offers a unique combination of Irish and international literary perspectives.

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A hardback reprint of the classic Irish Pages issue on Seamus Heaney to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death on 30 August 2013. “So many people in Ireland and overseas read, admired, and watched him. The extraordinary degree to which Heaney was a creative and ethical exemplar, shaper, mentor, influence, and generous friend for his fellow poets and writers comes through especially powerfully in this book, with its 54 contributors from Ireland, Britain, the United States and further afield...” Including four last poems by Seamus Heaney, this truly commemorative volume is sure to sell in very large numbers. Sven Birkerts and Helen Vendler on the man and the poet. A Suite of Obituaries & Global Reminiscences by leading poets and writers in Ireland, Britain and the United States. Poems by Kerry Hardie, Michael Coady, Paddy Bushe, Kathleen Jamie, Katie Donovan, Seán Lysaght, Damian Smyth, Ignatius McGovern, John F. Deane, Francis Harvey, Michael Longley, Alan Gillis, Moya Cannon and Harry Clifton. President Michael D. Higgins on John Hewitt & Richard Murphy on poetry and terror. Writing in Irish from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal Ó Searcaigh and others. PLUS: “Seamus Justin Heaney 1939-2013”, a unique photographic portfolio by Bobbie Hanvey.

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A week-to-view diary, this elegant and practical publication gathers extracts from twenty years of outstanding writing from Irish Pages (the island's premier literary journal) and The Irish Pages Press (British Book Award Small Press of the Year 2022, Island of Ireland). With an array of distinguished Irish and international authors, The 2025 Irish Pages Literary Diary is an essential holiday gift for readers, writers and anyone interested in the life of the mind and the state of the world.

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The Editors of Irish Pages – Chris Agee, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Kathleen Jamie and Meg Bateman – have assembled a new issue of the journal, entitled “The Anthropocene.” It aims to evoke the escalating global ecological crisis in the round, through many of its key components, including climate change, deforestation, the treatment of animals, oceanic pollution and over-fishing, the melting of glaciers, extinctions, land-use, plastic pollution and the waste crisis, the eco-vandalism of mining and the fashion industry, the extermination of indigenous peoples and languages, biodiversity and ecocide generally, and so on – and on. • A certain amount of poetry and prose deals with humanity and human consciousness more generally, in their historical, cultural, psychological, artistic and religious dimensions. • There is also a special section devoted to writing on the Pandemic. • As with other issues, however, there is also work included that does not bear explicitly on the theme of the issue.

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Collection of essays by Hubert Butler, edited by Chris Agee and Jacob Agee, published by The Irish Pages Press

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War in Europe is an essential issue from Irish Pages, the island's leading literary journal. The prime focus is the war in Ukraine, guest edited by the highly distinguished Ukrainian-American novelist Askold Melnyczuk. Much Ukrainian writing (from both inside and outside the country) has been assembled. A great deal of translation is involved, including by distinguished poets and translators whose first language is English. All involved view this issue as an urgent ethical project.

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For a long time the lofty grandeur and imposing presence of Mount Errigal in Co Donegal has charmed painters, photographers and film- makers. This great iconic peak of the North West has also been over half a century the focal point of much of Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s acclaimed poetry in the Irish language. He is the celebrant of its mysteries, the archivist of its seasons, the poet of its beauty. In Errigal: Sacred Mountain, Cathal O’Searcaigh (one of Ireland’s most celebrated poets) goes on a pilgrim path around Errigal and (in the active meditation of walking) summons up the spirit of this revered mountain, the largest in Ireland. In his “Passages of Light” as he calls them, we get a vivid and an insightful word-journey around a mountain that has shaped the thinking of one of the most eminent poets in the Irish language. Eloquently written, this book is a sure-footed mix of memoir, acute observation, wry humour and wisdom. It includes an engaging Preface by Irish American writer, Patrick Breslin; a scholarly Afterword by renowned historian and archaeologist Brian Lacey; and translations of Ó Searcaigh’s poems by some of Ireland’s most outstanding poets (Seamus Heaney, Paddy Bushe, Thomas McCarthy and Gabriel Rosenstock).

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This long-awaited selection of essays and reviews from one of Ireland’s leading critics brings together a wealth of ref lection, observation and astute literary comment. It ranges in time from William Carleton to Edna O’Brien, and in subject matter from recent Irish poetry to ghosts, children’s books and MI5. Patricia Craig holds strong opinions on literary mer- it, and some of the essays collected in this book are less than adulatory. For example, she has included a highly critical, but good-humoured and amusing re- assessment of Somerville and Ross; and a couple of recent critical studies come in for a somewhat sharp evaluation.Where the tone is moderately unadmiring it is always justified (if provocative), and contributes to the overall balance of the collection. In short, Kilclief & Other Essays presents an original, diverting, intelligent and thought-provoking assem- bly of essays and reviews. Patricia Craig’s latest book should appeal to the general reader as well as to those whose interests are more specialised, and it deserves a wide audience, not only in Ireland but also in the United Kingdom and beyond.

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With lyric grace and meditative clarity, Phantom Gang offers a daring dissection of civilizational violence in a variety of contexts from the intimate atavisms and inequalities of Irish history to the insidious growth of the global Big Tech economy in the present day alongside deep, sensually delicate explorations of broken love and salvaged memories. Honouring the work of a range of writers and photographers, including John Clare (1793-1864), Martín Chambi (1891-1973), Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and Gerda Taro (1910-1937), these poems unsettle the boundaries between past and present, elegy and tribute, folkloric remembrance and political reportage, interweaving each with all to create a compelling vision of a world in motion and a consciousness alive to change – as spectral voices and still-living presences seep “into the open echo-chamber / of poetry”, casting light on the inner and outer landscapes of the poet’s life in time. Following his acclaimed first collection, The Buried Breath, O’Rourke here expands and enriches the thematic concerns of his early work to accommodate new forms of portraiture and moral questioning, while further honing the “clean-boned” music of his poetic style, lit always by a profound emotional charge. Phantom Gang confirms O’Rourke as a leading new voice in Irish poetry.

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In setting the poets side by side, this volume also highlights the two main faith traditions of the West: Deane with his Roman Catholic background, rooted in the landscape of Mayo; and Harpur with his Protestant (Church of Ireland and Quaker) heritage, influenced by myth, medieval history and mystics. Their two approaches to everyday life and ultimate reality – including nature, saints and mystics, music, art, prayer, and issues of faith and doubt – combine to make a single volume full of lyrical beauty and powerful witness. In addition, an afterword consisting of an informal dialogue between the two poets complements in prose the themes their poems explore. This is a book to challenge, console, delight and make its readers think again about their own journeys through this “vale of soul-making”.

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Caustically humorous and polemically compulsive, Trump Rant is a work of meticulous political portraiture: a deep-delving and epoch-spanning investigation into the nature of power in American life, made luminous by Agee’s nuanced, exploratory understanding of authoritarian drift and thwarted democratic aspiration in a number of world-historical contexts, from Belfast to the Balkans to the formerly Confederate South. Free-roaming in its breadth of reference and tonal range, the Rant is at once viscerally personal and unsettlingly resonant, infused throughout with an almost hypnotic sense of scale, largesse, and historical moment. Already renowned as a poet of emotional delicacy and singular stylistic vision, Agee’s hallmark gifts of writerly intimacy and ethical resolve are here expanded and reconfigured on a panoramic canvas – moving from a pared-back opening section to the accelerating pace and barrage-like linguistic assaults of the latter addenda. But for all its freewheeling furies, shifting emotional registers and Kubrick-like black humour, it remains a remarkably formal work, moored to the relentlessly dangerous drumbeat of Donald J. Trump. The result is a combination of long-form radicalism and eclectic satire, startingly unique in its blend of aphorism, acuity and epic cultural imagining. Composed chronologically for nearly four years (from early 2017 until Election Day 2020), Trump Rant is a triumph of artistic witness and denunciation; an urgent retort to a global culture of imperilled legal standards and depleted literary response; and an incisive model of enlightenment and outrage in a “post-truth” world being visibly darkened by its criminal shadows.

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This is the first book of essays by a major new Irish non-fiction writer from the West of Ireland, comparable to the celebrated Kilkenny essayist Hubert Butler first published by The Lilliput Press and subsequently widely acclaimed. Gerard McCarthy’s writing is no less distinguished than Butler’s. McCarthy writes of his book: "Perhaps the Philosophers who had the most enduring influence on me were the contrary figures of Nietzsche and Marcus Aurelius. The reading of each was an antidote to the other, but I was drawn to both by an instinctive affinity.They were augmented subsequently by the gargantuan figure of Michel de Montaigne. My interest has continued to be in the region where Philosophy merges into Literature, with a preference for a language of metaphor rather than of abstract reasoning.These eight essays were written over the course of more than a decade.The fact that they have all been published in the one place, by the good offices of Irish Pages, has allowed me see the continuity between them, and to hope that they might be seen by the reader to form a unity.”

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In this wide-ranging, stylish and iconoclastic book, the acclaimed Belfast filmmaker and BBC author Mark Cousins reflects on his prolific career in documentary-making, meditating on the philosophers, writers, actors and films that have influenced him. From recollections of his childhood in Belfast to practical filmmaking advice for new directors, to the complexities of representing trauma on screen, this is a book that will captivate any readers interested in contemporary film and the history of cinema. Cousins’ essays are in conversation with iconic artistic figures, particularly Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian poet, filmmaker, writer and intellectual; and Orson Welles, an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter. He is also in dialogue D.H. Lawrence; film-directors Stanley Donen and Agnès Varda; actors Amy Adams, Channing Tatum, Quentin Tarantino, Tilda Swinton, Nicole Kidman and Dennis Hopper; screenwriter Paul Schrader; and last but not least, himself. The book will also feature an Introduction by Fintan O’Toole, a polemicist, literary editor, journalist and drama critic for The Irish Times, and the author of the best-selling memoir We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958.

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Ben Dorain: A Conversation with a Mountain draws on the work of an eighteenth-century Gaelic poem by Duncan Ba n MacIntyre, rendering it into English.Where it does so, this is not to present MacIntyre's poetry per se to an English-language reader, as is customary with a translation or version.

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Mainly non-fiction writing on The Belfast Agreement (The Good Friday Agreement) and Brexit, by 42 major Irish writers.

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Helen Lewis' acclaimed memoir, A Time to Speak (Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 1997), tells the story of the first thirty years of her life in Czechoslovakia, from childhood to her professional training as a choreographer and dancer. It also contains her devastating account of Nazi persecution, of loss and suffering in the Holocaust: Helen came very close to death. Maddy Tongue now completes the story of this extraordinary woman who overcame unimaginable suffering to become a creative force in Ireland. The author's friendship with Helen lasted for more than fifty years. As a dancer she performed in many of Helen's significant works. Shadows Behind the Dance describes Helen's creative approach, her struggle to overcome an Irish indifference to modern dance, her pursuit of perfection and her unshakeable belief in humanity. In Ireland today the presence of modern dance owes much to her innovative teaching and practice. Shadows Behind the Dance is supplemented with Chris Agee's 2002 interview with Helen, "An Irish Epilogue", and a folio of Holocaust poems and drawings by Michael Longley and Sarah Longley (who was a pupil of Helen's). Helen's sons, Robin and Michael, have also written a Foreword. The book has been generously funded through subscription by family, friends, colleagues and admirers of the unforgettable Helen Lewis.

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Here are Sappho’s songs and poems as English poems, all her famous pieces, all the fragments that can make connected sense, and all the discoveries of 2004 and 2014. These translations set out to be good English poetry first and foremost, and succeed well beyond other current versions. They have been made directly from Sappho’s Greek, by a poet with three collections to his credit, and are relatively close to the Greek. Each piece has a concise footnote that explains references and allusions, and suggests critical appreciation. A substantial Afterword says much more about Sappho’s themes, her art and style, and her historical setting. Sappho is one of the greatest poets of the western world. She lived on the Greek island of Lesbos around 600 BCE, near the very beginning of western literature, and composed 300 or so poems and songs. Her poems create a woman-centred world in which women and relationships are highly valued, a world of beauty and grace, love and loss, sandals and hairbands, all sometimes exalted and idealised. She opposes women’s values to those of the dominant male society around her, and is the first to do this in the western canon. She was famous in her lifetime and has been deeply admired ever since.

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Brian Holton is unique in that he can translate directly into Scots from the Chinese. This anthology consists of translations into Scots and English of the first sixty poems of the standard anthology Song Ci Sanbaishou(“300 Sòng Dynasty Song Lyrics”), edited by Zhu Zumou (1924), with a Translator’s Afterword/Owresetter’s Eftirword. In China, the “300 Song Ci” is the standard anthology for high school and undergraduate students. This book introduces Scots (and English) speakers to one of the major genres of Chinese lyric verse. This genre appeared in the ninth century, during the late Tang Dynasty, but is generally considered to have reached its full flowering in the following Song Dynasty (960-1279CE). Among the most elegant and beautiful texts written in any language, these lyrics are of particular interest in that they demonstrate the multum in parvo (less is mair) principle: like Chinese calligraphy or landscape painting, great and subtle effects result from a high artfulness that looks artless. The two main schools of Song Ci are the heroic (haofang) and the delicately restrained (wanyue). They are also technically interesting, each being written to the irregular metrical structure of one of a selection of 800-odd models, each of which was derived from an existing song form, often from Central Asia. The authors include masters such as Fan Zhongyan (989-1052), Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072), Liu Yong (987-1053), and Yan Jidao (1031-1106), as well as lesser-known writers.

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The Buried Breath announces the arrival of a striking new voice and poetic talent. With formal ease and a sharply engaged sense of ethical inquiry, these lucid, lyrical poems delve into art and history, remembered lives and contemporary conflicts, for illumination and insight.

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