The English poet Simon Armitage read from his work this past week at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway. The American edition of Seeing Stars, the collection from which this poem is taken, will appear from Random House in August. Aviators They’d overbooked the plane. “At this moment in time,” announced the woman [...]
Filed under: By Dick | Leave a Comment »
I’ve just come from a small parking lot over on Nun’s Island here in Galway, where I was one of the audience of twelve at the 5:00 p.m. performance(s) of Neil Labute’s Autobahn, which takes in four parked cars. Each car contains a young man and a young woman, the actors, in the front seats, [...]
Filed under: By Dick | Leave a Comment »
American poet Thomas Lux reads on Friday afternoon at the Cuirt International Festival of Literature in Galway, Ireland. Here’s a good example of his work: Gorgeous Surfaces They are, the surfaces, gorgeous: a master pastry chef at work here, the dips and whorls, the wrist-twist squeezes of cream from the tube to the [...]
Filed under: By Dick | Leave a Comment »
The Cuirt International Festival of Literature begins this evening with a wine and canapés reception at the City Museum, followed by a program of readings by Dermot Healy and Paul Murray from their novels Long Time, No See and Skippy Dies at the Town Hall Theatre. Then, full-day programs will run from Wednesday through Sunday, [...]
Filed under: By Dick | Leave a Comment »
April is One City, One Book month in Dublin and this year’s book is the novel Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor, author of Star of the Sea. Ghost Light, on Bookworks’ shelves now, is the moving, fictionalized story of Molly Allgood, who as a young girl was an actress in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and the [...]
Filed under: By Dick | Leave a Comment »
Donal Og It is late last night the dog was speaking of you; the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh. It is you are the lonely bird through the woods; and that you may be without a mate until you find me. You promised me, and you said a lie to me, [...]
Filed under: By Dick | Leave a Comment »
Roddy Doyle gave a good reading of a short story at the Cuirt Festival in Galway this past week. And at my guest house I was reading selections from a collection of essays about the Irish writer and dramatist John Millington Synge. One of the essays is Roddy Doyle’s about the difficulties of getting Dublin [...]
Filed under: By Dick | Leave a Comment »
This morning fifty or sixty people gathered on the stone bridge over the Corrib River for the unveiling of a bronze plaque with a poem by Moya Cannon. This is the sixth year that a poetry plaque has been installed around Galway during the Cuirt Festival of Literature. The first was of a poem by [...]
Filed under: 1, By Dick | Leave a Comment »
While in Ireland, I’ve been asked numerous times about the craziness that brought about the suicide of the Irish schoolgirl Phoebe Prince in South Hadley, Mass., that Dani mentioned in earlier post. I certainly don’t have any satisfactory explanation for what happened, but most of the people who have brought it up seem to [...]
Filed under: By Dick | Leave a Comment »
Philip MacDermott’s Sherry Trifle After a skyped recipe query from his daughter Cláir of Nantucket, my host in Malahide, on the sea just north of Dublin, Philip MacDermott, decided he should whip up a sherry trifle for his sister’s visit. It was only after it was finished that I realized I should have photographed the [...]
Filed under: 1, By Dick, Cookworks | Leave a Comment »
|
