Ciarán O’Rourke There’s a strangeness to singing in a language you don’t understand, akin, perhaps, to the sensation that comes with remembering, vividly, a person who has died. In both cases, you can almost touch the life recalled, even as the shadow glimpsed in that one word, “almost”, clouds your every sense. Whenever I hear a song, … Read more
Dutch Masters An age away, the scented evergreens are still, a lucent wave commits to hush, the sun emits a breath, as the noon-deep labourings commence: the slender, severed necks are tossed, the throttled mouths are mounted in the heat, and inch by inch the fragrant earth is stripped of human foliage, an evacuated island … Read more
Questioning a Tank Into the shocked, shucked shell of the hospital at Kunduz, which for ten days past, in streaming light (the season’s slant of sun), has spilled a steaming trail of twisted bricks, chewed up rails, a grieving mist – the site where the counted, cradled sick burned up, the still un- bordered doctors … Read more
For a number of years now, I’ve been convinced (too fervently, in the opinion of some of my friends!) that Lana Del Rey ranks among America’s most challenging and skillful of contemporary wordsmiths: a singer-poet with a unique (and often unsettling) talent for cultural imagining. Stylish, intelligent, irreverent, and vulnerable, her music packs a poetic … Read more
Before Ireland’s third pandemic lockdown began, in December 2020, I paid a visit to my local library, in the hope of stocking up on books and films to sustain me in the months ahead. And I’m glad I did: the long weeks of isolation would have been far heavier, more dispiriting and lonely, without the … Read more