Irish-American Books

This is one of the most powerful books ever wrtten about 19th Century Ireland. It is at once a scholarly dissertation as every page provides all of the various sources Gerard P. Moran used in his research but it's much more than that.

This book is gripping and difficult to put down as the narrative places you right in the midst of the misery and pain endured by the Irish before, during and after the Great Famine. While the subject is not strictly about the Great Famine, it incorporate the ongoing famine and crushing poverty of the times and tells the story better than many other books of this kind that I have read.

Professor Moran quotes from various letters and documents liberally throughout and and even when he paraphrases or reports on the events, it all blends into a compelling story with only a handful of people who had the interests of the Irish paupers and cottiers at heart.

All of the important characters of the period, British, Irish and Canadian and more are all here, but so are the names of many of the numerous wretches subjected to the horrors of the times.

Whether you agree with the process of Assisted Emigration or not, this book will leave you thinking and shaking your head at the inability of so many people to do what is right and humane.

The only negative note is the silly cartoon on the cover which does not appear to fit the enormous story inside.

John Jones has previously written on Keats (and Embarrassment) on Wordsworth (The Egotistical Sublime) and on Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky). He is probably one of the two or three best critics writing in English at present. At one stage of his career he worked in naval intelligence, at another in the law: traces of both disciplines lurk in his approach. He specialises in a kind of poetic-cum-forensic close-reading of text which stays with you long after you have closed the book. All of his books fall into the category of: "If you only read one book on X, read this."

Shakespeare is big game for Jones, the biggest. Most critics give up when they get to Shakespeare. Borges famously suggested Shakespeare in some crucial sense lacked identity. "I am not what I am," as he makes Iago say. It was the Argentinian's explanation for the mystery of how one person could create so many characters. As they used to say about Clapton, Shakespeare was God.

Jones doesn't cop out so easily. He tracks Shakespeare by his spoor, so to speak. The highlight of the book is the chapter where he looks at "Hand D" - a crowd scene in the fragmentary manuscript play "The Boke of Thomas More", echoes the convincing argument that it is by Shakespeare and persuades the reader that it is in many senses deeply revelatory of who Shakespeare was, or at least, how he worked (hence the title). The passage about "watery parsnips" is a gem. It's the most useful work about Shakespeare to be published in many years.

The price is prohibitive, I know, but get your library to order it!

This book is perfect for anyone interested in their Irish roots, it is a definitive look at the Irish in Charleston.

The author of "Tales from the Irish Club" weaves a well-worn blanket of gritty, touching, disturbing, and enchanting tales set against the urban backdrop of Pittsburgh. It made me want to hoist a pint in memory of the very real characters this book evokes.

Susan Blanshard inhabits the sensual universe as comfortably and elegantly as if it were a second skin. Her writing is alive with life and possibilities of surfaces and what lies beneath them.
Sheetstone: Memoir for a Lover, is written as poetic prose in an epic form of sensual journal. These literary notes are creative preface for her novel written a year later titled "Sleeping with the Artist".

Poets must cringe when they run across these kinds of reviews (Salinger's Seymour Glass found the scribbling in the margins of library books most depressing)--who knows what to say about poetry, especially one who is a casual reader? But here one can at least say what one likes or dislikes.

I like this book of poems. In "Shepherdess with an Automatic" one finds short poems, usually no more than a page in length, that flash in your mind as if in recollection and that build upon each other to create a presence that suggests your past is much more than a burden to overcome--it is your inescapable undersong.

One finishing stanza that I think marvelous, from "Nocturne", "The trick is to remain unenticed by another:/not impressed, but not beyond impression,/adrift and at home in recognizable streets" is perhaps what seems most central to these poems and this poet.

In "Small Life" (I'd love to reproduce it, as it is my favorite and my wish for you to know it if you do not buy this book) the poet reflects upon a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, depicting a man, no more than a shadow of a man really, frozen in mid-air, about to step into the middle of a large puddle of water. "Is this//what it means to be immortal..."? "--See how the shadow below/stays close, attuned/like a soul or most perfect mimic." (A shadow, a soul, a mimic is "at home and adrift in recognizable streets.") After reading this several times I had to find a copy of the photograph (I've pasted it into my book!).

Satterfield's poems seem to hover just outside of experience, or rather, outside the reflection upon experience--apparitions returned to make sense of the past.

"I like to feel water slip/off the skin,/the lightness after/what cannot be lifted/is lifted."

"What is the body?//A barrier to the crossing."

"How I'd like to believe in hope,/but the past, it seems, is like gravity,/the force that keeps us in place."

At home and adrift but always in the same (recognizable) place.

Tom Stoppard is arguably the single finest playwright of his generation, and the Coast of Utopia trilogy is a massive undertaking that in the hands of a less skilled author could have gone awry and badly. Stoppard though manages to make what could be a painfully pedantic history lesson into a moving portrayal of love, ideology, loss, and change.

Shipwreck is decidedly the most tragic of the three, the loss of innocence and the tragically young deaths of several characters are heart breaking, as is the way Stoppard deals the blow to the reader or audience. Vissarion Belinsky in particular lends a spark to the entire piece, and his desperation at finding the answer he has spent his life searching for is one of the most heart wrenching things I have ever read.

The history is neither dominate or secondary to the characterization here, rather Stoppard manages to make the historical events we know (or may not know) part and parcel of the volatile and fascinating lives of some of Russias greatest citizens.

I'm often dissatisfied with modern American poetry which to me appears narcissistic in content and undistinguished in its craft. Then I come across a book like Ger Killeen's 'Signs Following' and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Not only does this poet show a real mastery of poetic technique (amazingly varied); his poems are actually about something other than himself-- profound meditations on all the big questions of love, death, violence, God... in language that is stunningly gorgeous (See the poem 'Lorca Leaving' if you want to know the meaning of gorgeous).
In the heart of the book there is a group of sonnets called 'Chemical Wedding' which I suspect could become a classic sequence: it's almost as if Jung meets Yeats and produces these weird, unsettling moments of unsparing psychological clarity.
I'm not sure I know of any contemporary poet who sounds quite like Killeen (maybe the early Paul Muldoon?). His new book gives me great hope for the future of kind of poetry from which you come away with a new understanding of yourself and the world...and many new questions.

I loved the first Silk Stalkings, and am thrilled with the new edition, which contains well-researched, cross-indexed information about my favorite kind of author--women who write series mysteries. The book is cross-referenced and chock full of information, not the least of which are lists of authors with all their psuedonyms for those who write under more than one name. I couldn't do without this book.

This collection of plays offers children some wacky clowning dialogue. The possibilites for dramatic action are numerous. A fun time will be had by all without the usual moralizing that so many children's plays slap on kids.