Jenny Ní Ruiséil is a musician and Yoga teacher, based in the west of Ireland. She creates music inspired by her roots finding her voice through singing in the Irish language, as well as taking inspiration from medicine music around the world and devotional chanting tradition of bhakti yoga and other spiritual traditions. Jenny is … Read more
Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin (Faber and Faber, 2025) The “power to think / has clean left me”, Tom Paulin claims – not quite convincingly – in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. “Have I at last started to climb out / of … Read more
A reliable source, who happens to be representing him, now informs me that Banksy is to be prosecuted over his RCJ mural. This form of artistic censorship, leads me to consider the important role that art has played in terms of political commentary, and how some of the masterpieces in this genre resonate with contemporary … Read more
Gillnets I remember as a child picking them out from the bow, and peering down at currents moving freely through their masks – the net draped from an orderly row of cork floaters, near shore. There a canopy of beeches could dapple light onto the water’s surface, or space between two pine boughs slant a … Read more
Fothering the sheep Only minus seven this morning but the gate latches are frozen solid. ‘We’ll need a kettleful to unfreeze them.’ There’s more snow forecast and a gale warning. ‘We need to get hay up to the sheep before it blows in.’ The cart’s struggling. The sheep are gathered, waiting. ‘They’re patient, I’ll give … Read more
It would surely be a great piece of good fortune for Paddy … if English cultivation could drive all his fairies out of his head Examiner, June 10, 1843, British Library Newspapers What hope is there for a nation which lives on potatoes? Charles Trevelyan At the end of March last year, during what … Read more
There is a Panther on the Streets of Paris slinging hammocks of intent between each step, hunting unbroken hearts beyond the senses. No one knows. Rumours breeze like leaves along Boulevard Saint Germain. Another takes a table at Le Café Des Arts indistinct in clouds of Vogue Bleu. No one. Not even the off-duty gendarme … Read more
Review: Fog Bells: 8 Contemporary Turkish Poets (Dedalus Press, 2025) “A writer’s life”, the poet Nick Laird once remarked, with a self-assurance befitting a Royal Society of Literature Fellow, “is a cycle of trying to get to their work, sitting staring at the blank screen, wandering off, steering their reluctant bodies back” to the desk … Read more
Luke 2:1-7 _ It was the time Augustus Caesar had cried pax As children used to do, and said the world must now be taxed, _ When Joseph, following the government decree, Went out of Nazareth and travelled down through Galilee. _ If … Read more
My first memory of music is of being very young, maybe three years old, held in my father’s arms while we danced in our living room. There was a large sound system filling the space, and I remember being completely absorbed by it. I didn’t have words for what I was feeling then, but I … Read more