From Kildare arts: The Kildare Artist Notebook project was established by Kildare County Council Arts Service in 2011. Artists were invited to take an A5 Moleskine notebook, to use it as they wished and to return it, to become part…
The Memory Police Yoko Ogawa Harvill Secker €13.17 This novel which was published in Japanese in 1994, and now in a seamless translation by Stephen Snyder, took twenty five years to reach the English-speaking world. It is still a relevant…
You might like to listen to my reading of my poem Ascending a Liberties Stairway,1952 on Lyric FM. Broadcast 28/12/2019 It is from my collection Rus in Urbe https://amzn.to/2OhfRce or https://amzn.to/2JtkcKQ in paperback, ebook, audio and also translated into Spanish,…
The Club Takis Würger Grove Press £12.99 In a deceptive start to this novel, translated from German, there is beautiful lyrical writing where young Hans Stickler lives idyllically in a forest in Lower Saxony with his parents. However, the narrative…
You might like to listen to my reading of my poem Bóthar na dTaibhsí/ Ghost Road on Lyric FM. Broadcast 26th October, 2019. It is from my collection Rus in Urbe, https://amzn.to/2OhfRce or https://amzn.to/2JtkcKQ in paperback, ebook, audio and also translated…
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments Saidiya Hartman Serpent’s Tail €27 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments which is subtitled Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, examines the lives of various oppressed black women in Harlem and Philadelphia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many…
Christmas Eve The birds make fake bird songs that I heard in the Christmas shops, the fake moon is spotted before dark, the navyblue sky is waiting for its absence to be filled, houses stand like sentries, men in windows…
When my children were small I used to tell them stories of Jo Jo, an endearing but mischievous little girl of eight. After my children grew up they asked me to write out these stories so that they…
The Secrets We Kept Lara Prescott Random House €16 The CIA employed women during the Cold War with the Soviet Union as Swallows or Carriers. A Swallow was a woman who used her wiles to gain information and a Carrier…
The Carrier Mattias Berg MacLehose Press €21 Erasmus Levine’s mother, believing her son was destined for great things, named him after the famous humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam. His talent for encryption is recognised at an early stage and he is…