Patricia’s Blog
Michael Longley’s new volume A Hundred Doors is slim and snug and almost weightless in the hand. He returns again, almost apologetically, to a place that changed his life: ‘I am writing too much about Carrigskeewaun.’ He is there for the millennium, at Christmas, at lambing time, and – for the first time – with his new…
Read More
So said Margaret Hayes, Dublin City Librarian at the opening of the DublinSwell event in the city’s gleaming, green-lit, Convention Centre last week. This, she said, was Ireland’s largest literary event ever. It was a celebration of Dublin’s listing as a UNESCO City of Literature – one of only four cities in the world to receive this…
Read More
I like this idea from City of a Thousand Welcomes. A simple notion asking volunteers to meet up wtih a visitor to Dublin and share their enthusiasm for the city.
You fill in a simple form and nominate one thing every visitor to Dublin should see. For me it is the National Library of Ireland, packed with archives and exhibitions and literary ghosts. And a great place to stand quietly on the building steps and watch the comings and goings at our Dail next door.
Only problem for me is that I probably don’t qualify as a Dubliner!
Read More
Catherine Morris is curator of the National Library of Ireland exhibition Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival at Kildare Street, Dublin. Next Tuesday she will present a guided tour of the exhibition dealing with the life of an intriguing woman. Alice Milligan (1866-1953), from the Northern Ireland Protestant Unionist tradition, put Northern Ireland at the centre of…
Read More
I was back In Achill recently when the wind roared and the Atlantic churned and the mist hid the outlines of Slievemore. I did a quick car tour of some literary haunts. Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries writers and visual artists flocked to Achill, helped by the extension of the railway line to the…
Read More
Neil Jordan’s new novel Mistaken is about two Dubliners, Kevin and Gerard, who spend their lives being mistaken for one another. A mix of thriller and gothic genres, it is Neil Jordan’s first novel in six years. You can see Neil Jordan talk about his work on TV3 here. All the Kyleglass Book Worms agree that the book…
Read MoreGoodbye, Waterstones, Dawson Street branch « The Anti-Room. Antonia Hart’s piece on The Anti-Room Blog about Waterstones of Dawson Street, which closes its doors today for the last time, expresses the feelings of many. I will miss the browsing, followed by musing in the Reader’s Cafe and then more browsing. A perfect spot for literary rejuvenation is now no…
Read MoreOral History and Dinnsheanchas: Tracing Old Routes Across Mayo | The Irish Story. This is my review – just published on The Irish Story online site – of the En Route Public Art Project by artist Aileen Lambert. The project traces the place lore of pathways that criss-cross the landscape where I grew up and rambled in the East…
Read MoreColumnist who gave her readers glimpse of the Burren calls it a day – The Irish Times – Fri, Jan 28, 2011. Sarah Poyntz’s essay gems in The Guardian’s Country Diary have come to an end. Her subject was the Burren, a place where I love to ramble and ruminate. In her final contribution she…
Read More
Jo Slade’s biography poem The Artist’s Room traces the artist Gwen John (1876-1939) through Paris at the start of the twentieth-century: ‘I looked for her in Paris…/ walked from place to place, lived the smells, the sounds, / followed a plan I’d drawn.’ A painter-poet, Jo Slade uses her artist’s eye to distill the essence of Gwen John’s…
Read More