Posted in Interviews, Ireland, New Yorkers, Novelists, Politics, tagged Brooklyn, Colm Toibin on April 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, April 25, 2009
IT’S SPRINGTIME in Brooklyn, in the old Italian neighbourhood of Cobble Hill. But suddenly it doesn’t feel like Brooklyn anymore; suddenly the air seems that of a small Irish town, of a small Irish sittingroom, where a small Irish boy sits at a card table with his [...]
Posted in Ireland, New Yorkers, News, Poetry, Poets, tagged Philip Schultz on April 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
First Published: The Irish Times, April 21, 2009
‘I ALWAYS ASSUMED that I was going to die around the same age as him,” says Philip Schultz of the father he lost almost 50 years ago. “I always thought of that age as some kind of milestone. And then, suddenly, I had lived beyond him.”
Schultz, now 64, [...]
Posted in Interviews, Ireland, News, Novelists, tagged John Banville, Paris Review on April 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
My interview with John Banville, conducted on four occasions in Dublin between 2007 and 2008, has just been published in the Spring 2009 issue of The Paris Review. You can read an excerpt here.
Posted in 1, Features, Ireland, Poets, Visual Arts on April 11, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I loved every minute of this year’s DLR Poetry Now festival; the poets were terrific, the audiences were large and enthusiastic and frank, and our celebration of Seamus Heaney’s 70th Birthday was a joy to witness (I would say that, but lots of people who were there, including all our participating poets, have told me [...]
Posted in Features, Ireland, Poetry, Poets on April 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
First Published: “Heaney at 70″, an Irish Times Special Report to celebrate the 70th Birthday of Seamus Heaney
April 13, 2009
WHEN FIRST he spoke to America, Seamus Heaney did not soften the edge of his words. In fact, in his first major interview with an American newspaper, Heaney suggested that it was a certain softness in [...]
Posted in Features, Ireland, Journalists, Poetry, Poets, tagged Literary Journalism, Mark Doty, Poetry, Poetry Interviews, W.S. Merwin on March 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
First Published: Poetry Ireland Newsletter, March 2009
This is how I make my living, or a large part of it: I sit and talk with poets. Sometimes, I go to their houses to talk with them; sometimes, I spend an hour with them in a cafe, or a restaurant, or a hotel bar; sometimes, I sit [...]
Posted in Interviews, Ireland, Music, New Yorkers, Poetry, Poets, tagged Bill Whelan, Michael Longley on March 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
First Published: The Irish Times, March 14th, 2009
DEPRESSION HAS TO be outside of our options at the moment,” says Bill Whelan. He’s talking about Ireland. He’s talking about the end of that era in Irish history to which some believe Whelan himself, with Riverdance in 1994, wrote the official soundtrack: the Celtic Tiger. Which is [...]
Posted in Features, Ireland, New Yorkers, Reviews, tagged Irish Theatre on December 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
First published: The Irish Times, December 17, 2008
YOU’RE IN A MIDTOWN Manhattan theatre. It’s the opening night of an Irish musical comedy about espionage and intrigue during World War II. Around you in the audience are some people who’ve seen the show before – in Ireland or in Edinburgh – and some who haven’t. [...]
Posted in Features, Ireland, New Yorkers on November 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
First Published in The Gloss Magazine, Ireland, November 2008
Scavenged from the cheap seats at last month’s New York fashion week, a grab bag of the influences we’re all meant to be sporting this season: Sci-Fi, Fetish, Deco, the designs of Alexander Girard, The Women (the 1939 original, not the new embarrassment), the late Yves Saint [...]
Posted in Interviews, Ireland, Poets on May 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
HENRY DAVID Thoreau imagines himself as a “little Irish boy”, living in a shanty. Walt Whitman addresses “Old Ireland”, where an “ancient sorrowful mother” crouches over a grave. Robert Frost presents us with ‘The Cow’s in the Corn’, a “One-Act Irish Play in Rhyme”, in which O’Toole reads a paper on Home Rule and [...]
