Reading Ireland

Number 9 / Winter 2018 READING THEIRELAND LITTLE MAGAZINE 1 Table of Contents 2 Introduction 7 In Memoriam: Dr. Maurice Hayes 1927-2017: A Man for All Counties 10 Questions for Joan Hayes 12 Frank Ormsby: Local Poet in a Global World by Adrienne Leavy 17 Interview: Adrienne Leavy in conversation with Frank Ormsby 25 Four poems by Frank Ormsby 27 Essay: Fran Brearton on Michael Longley’s Angel Hill 29 Poem: “Ceasefire” by Michael Longley 30 Essay: “The Light Fantastic of Paul Muldoon” by Mary O' Malley 34 Essay: “Poetry and Survival: Derek Mahon, Against the Clock” by Hugh Haughton 39 Profile: “Balancing Fire, Dreams and the Signatures of All Things: Sinéad Morrissey’s Poetry and Poetics” by Brian Caraher 69 Essay: “Between Solitude and Company: The ‘I’ and Its Levinasian Relationships with Otherness In Medbh McGuckian’s Poetry” by Erin Mitchell Subscribe 77 Essay: “Reconfigurations in Colette Bryce’s Poetry” by Ailbhe McDaid 89 Review: “Beauty for Ashes.” Orla Fay reviews Leontia Flynn’s The Radio Reading Ireland is published 94 Eugene McCabe: Border Chronicler, Universal Storyteller by Adrienne Leavy bi-annually and is available to 97 Adrienne Leavy in conversation with Eugene McCabe subscribers at a cost of $40 for four 103 Essay: “Brian Moore’s Lonely Judith: A Crash Course in Craft” by Tara Ison issues. The aim of the magazine 112 Interview: Tony Kilgallin in conversation with the late Brian Moore is to provide in-depth analysis of 122 Essay: “All Shall Be Well: Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break” Irish Literature, past and present, by Richard Rankin Russell along with opening a window onto 130 Essay: “Inscribing the Margins: Homage to Ben Kiely” by Gibbons Ruark 1 the best of contemporary Irish 139 Essay: “Getting in Good Trouble – A Conversation with Stuart Bailie” poetry, prose, drama and culture. by Yvonne Watterson 144 Essay: “A Work In Progress: The Other World of Van Morrison and Gerald Dawe” To subscribe, please visit by Yvonne Watterson readingireland.net 148 Two poems by Gerald Dawe 149 Spotlight on Reconstructions: The Troubles in Photographs and Words Poems and words by Steafán Hanvey, photography by Bobbie Hanvey by Adrienne Leavy 153 Essay and interview: “Safer Insane: Reflections on the 2018 Man Booker Prize Winner, Milkman by Anna Burns” by Malachi O’ Doherty Contributors 157 Spotlight on Paul McVeigh 159 Review: Cúchulainn, Ulster’s Greatest Hero by Réamonn Ó Ciaráin by Byddi Lee Editor: Adrienne Leavy 162 Spotlight on the Patrick Kavanagh Center Design: Eric Montgomery 165 Essay: “Patrick Kavanagh: Poet of the Earth: An Introduction” by Una Agnew giantboy.com 186 Poem: “In Memory of My Mother” by Patrick Kavanagh translated into Irish by Caitríona Ní Chléirchín 188 Poem: “Banríon an Uaignis / the Queen of Loneliness” by Caitríona Ní Chléirchín. Translated into English by Peter Fallon 189 Spotlight on the Seamus Heaney HomePlace Cover image courtesy of Fergus Mullen. Clogherhead, County Louth. The lapetus suture is a large geological fault that marks the collision zone where the north of Ireland and Scotland collided with southern Ireland, England and Wales. Up until then, the vast lapetus ocean had existed between them over a period of about 200 million years. It gradually closed until collision was complete by about 400 million years ago. For more information visit www.geolsoc.org.uk Introduction Welcome to the 2018 winter issue of Reading Ireland, which focuses on writers from the Province of Ulster. The island of Ireland has historically been divided into four Provinces – Ulster, Munster, Connaught and Leinster. The geographic Province of Ulster includes the six counties of Northern Ire- land along with three counties in Southern Ireland, Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan, and it is the literature of these nine counties that we celebrate in this issue. We open with a tribute to the late Dr. Maurice Hayes, a remarkable public figure and author who passed away on December 23, 2017, in his hometown of Downpatrick in County Down. A statement released by the Development Adrienne Leavy, Eugene McCabe and Margot McCabe. October 2018. and Alumni Relations Office of Queen’s University summed Photograph copyright Bobbie Hanvey. up Dr. Hayes’s legacy thus: “Few public figures in the last 100 years have made such a wide-ranging contribution to local government, health, politics (in both Northern Ireland and the Republic), sport, culture and Queen’s University governance, as alumnus and honorary graduate, Dr. Maurice Hayes.” 2 Our coverage of Dr. Hayes’s remarkable life includes a discussion with his widow Joan Hayes, and a series of intimate portraits by his friend and renowned photographer, Bobbie Hanvey. Since the publication of his first collection, A Store of Candles (1977), Frank Ormsby has been a central figure in Northern Irish poetry, crafting a lyrical body of work which grows richer and more diverse with every collection he publishes. Over the course of his career Ormsby has invested much of his imaginative life in his native Fermanagh, and his creative affinity to Patrick Kavanagh is as strong as that of Seamus Heaney’s, though both poets draw on Kavanagh’s example in different ways. With his most recent collection, The Darkness of Snow, Ormsby extends his formidable range and consolidates his reputation as one of Ire- land’s finest lyric poets. We are delighted to also include an in-depth interview with the poet and to publish four poems from his next collection, The Rain Barrel,which will be published in October 2019. In his introduction to Michael Longley’s work in An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, Wes Davis writes that over the course of his long career Longley had “built a reputation for himself as the master craftsman of Ulster poetry,” noting that the poet had “injected a strong dose of classicism into Irish poetry, while at the same time rooting his own work firmly in the landscape of the island’s rural west.”1 Fran Brearton has written extensively on Longley’s poetry and here she provides an in-depth review and analysis of the poet’s most recent collection, Angel Hill. Along with Brearton’s essay we are delighted to include Longley’s artful sonnet, “Ceasefire.” First published in 1994, and drawing on Homer’s epic,The Iliad, the poem has been read by many critics as a sophisticated commentary on the important Republican and Loyalist ceasefires which occurred in Northern Ireland during 1994. Paul Muldoon is the youngest member of a group of Northern poets including Heaney, Long- ley and Derek Mahon which gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Poet Mary O’ Malley revisits two of Muldoon’s early collections, Meeting the British (1987), and Madoc: A Mystery (1990), and discusses Muldoon’s layered use of conceit, allusion and wit in these volumes. O’Malley celebrates Muldoon’s ability to craft a poetics that is both clever and irreverent while simultaneously grounding it in deeply serious historical, personal and philosophical concerns. Several years ago Derek Mahon announced he had stopped writing poems, choosing instead to concentrate on prose. Thereafter, he published two prose volumes, Red Sails (2014) and Olympia and the Internet (2017), which Mahon scholar Hugh Haughton characterizes as “poems by other means.” The complicated sensibility of Mahon is in full evidence in his return to poetry this year with a new collection, Against the Clock (2018). In his detailed review of the volume Haughton concludes that these poems “confirm Mahon as an indispensable ecological voice and a survivor poet who, like Auden, continues to respond to the challenges of cultural change, political crisis, and global threat in the present.” The youngest winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection, Parallax (2003), and the Forward Prize for Poetry for her sixth collection, On Balance (2017), Sinéad Morrissey has established herself as one of the fore- most poets of her generation. Notwithstanding the critical praise her work attracts, there is still relatively little scholarly analysis available on her poetry. Reading Ireland is delighted to include in this issue Brian Caraher’s detailed study of Morrissey’s corpus, one that should be a touchstone for future scholars of the poet’s work. A former colleague of Morrissey’s at Queen’s University Belfast, Caraher traces the critical reception of her poetry along with the significant moments and turns in Morrissey’s developing poetic trajectory, from her first 3 volume, There was Fire in Vancouver(1996), to the most recent collection, On Balance (2017). Belfast-born Medbh McGuckian is another unique voice in Irish poetry, producing a distinctive body of work that has drawn sustained critical praise and provoked comparisons to the work of Emily Dickinson, John Ashberry and Rainer Maria Rilke among others. Her complex representations of alternative forms of feminine sexuality often serve as oblique commentary on the political discourse of Northern Ireland. Erin Mitchell examines the ways in which McGuckian’s poetic speakers use language and imagery to express states of solitude, which can be simultaneously longed for and unwanted, often transforming into loneliness and grief. As Mitchell argues, in many of the poet’s elegies the boundaries between the self and the “Other” further exacerbates the sense of isolation which is a defining characteristic of much of McGuckian’s work, adding a deliberate sense of indeterminacy to her poetry. Ailbhe McDaid’s essay on Derry born poet Colette Bryce considers how Bryce aesthetically explores issues of memory and migration which in turn evoke questions of personal, national and social identity. Although Bryce has lived outside Northern Ireland for most of her adult life, McDaid argues that there is “little doubt about the significance of Bryce’s relationship with her native city of Derry.” Her essay discusses “Bryce’s tensions of appearing and disap- pearing in her poetry of Derry” and how this creative stressor influences her work.

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