The Jehovah’s Witnesses were driving me crazy with their too-polite knocks and damnation pamphlets. Maybe they earned extra credit for early morning salvation attempts? I was always too sleepy to answer and peeked thru the peephole at their church lady hats and cheap briefcases as they walked to the curb. Martha at the hardware store … Read more
Cyprus, 1965 The lads of the 42nd Infantry Battalion sat slumped on the Land Rover’s steel floor as we lurched over dirt tracks; shade from the tarpaulin kept them cool as they spoke quietly together, in Irish. Since arriving in Cyprus, they’d spoken no other language. I knew most of them had joined up at … Read more
Try mph To Payney, Tinpan, JJ, Tom P., Tom C., Col, Ry, Peewee I know the car I would most love to own: Well red, early seventies TR6, That beautiful, British-built, roadster mix, Boldly bearing the boxed badge of renown – Great jewel in Triumph’s commercial crown – Two point five litre, manual, straight-six, Mint … Read more
Dublin and Monaghan people remember where they were on the 17th May 1974, the day three bombs exploded in Dublin and one in Monaghan. A UCD undergraduate at the time, I was in the library in Belfield when news of the bombs in Parnell Street, Talbot Street and South Leinster Street came through. We were … Read more
Congolese composer, guitarist, and singer Niwel Tsumbu has just released a video for ‘Words of Wisdom’ with Éamonn Cagney — and you can check it out below. This new track features Tsumbu on guitar, percussionist Cagney, violinist Cora Venus Lunny, as well as a host of sampled voices. The composer describes his intention with the … Read more
Advisory Epistle From Literature Quangocrat after Alexander Pope About my person, I at all times carry a bowl of re-heated cocktail sausages and a completed application form asking that I be better funded next year. I only read novels which interrogate the relationship between gout and Islamist terrorism, translated from the obligatory French; and poets … Read more
Poiesis, from the Ancient Greek: ποίησις meaning knowing by making, is ‘the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.’[i] It is the process of shaping as opposed to doing. It is not imposed; it is a process of listening; of working with. In an interview with Meredith Monk … Read more
At the end of 2019, I wrote: In these times it is perhaps inevitable that people will want to write poems about climate change, or Twitter and politics. But poetry knows in its heart, what has already ended inside your consciousness, to which you and the world are gradually catching up. In the greatest poems … Read more
They who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness. John Milton, ‘An Apology for Smectymnuus with the Reason of Church-Government’ (1642) Unfortunately I just missed out on meeting one of the totemic figures of our time in Noam Chomsky. In 1997, as a Boston-based Harvard student, I was taken to visit … Read more
We sent twenty questions to Maverick film maker Bob Quinn who published ten excerpts of his memoir A Monk Manqué with us last year. The featured image is of Bob Quinn meeting Colonel Ghaddafi in 1988 from one episode that can be viewed here. What advice would you have for your eighteen-year-old self if you … Read more