David Wheatley is the author of four collections of poetry, published by The Gallery Press, the most recent of which is A Nest on the Waves (2010). He recently took up the post of Senior Lecturer in creative writing and modern literature at the University of Aberdeen. The following interview was conducted by Bill Tinley …
Michael Cronin on religion and critical thinking in post-boom Ireland If you happened to find yourself in Prague on St. Patrick’s Day 1977 and you went looking for flowers you might eventually ask yourself the following question. Why were all the florists closed? The answer was one man, the philosopher, Jan Patočka, alone responsible …
By Peter Sirr What are we concerned with? What are we really attached to? Are we entitled to reject the contamination of the impermanent and to withdraw into the stronghold of speech, like the king in Poe’s tale, far from the plague-stricken land? Or did we love the lost object for its own sake, and …
Peter Sirr on the old routes of Dublin One by one they dissolve. Calatrava’s Samuel Beckett is tugged back to Rotterdam; off go the O’Casey, the Talbot Memorial, the Loopline, Butt Bridge, O’Connell Bridge, The Ha’penny Bridge, the Millennium Bridge, Grattan Bridge, O’Donovan Rossa Bridge, Fr Mathew Bridge, the first of them all, great bridge, …
A Christian Brothers’ primary school in Mullingar in the late 1960s. A young boy has been forced to sit under the teacher’s desk for failing a spelling test. Every time he makes a mistake he receives a further kick from the teacher. Was this abuse? Not in the view of the CEO of Ryanair, Michael … Continue reading
In April 1986 in the downstairs lounge of the Stag’s Head Bar in Dublin, Graph was launched. It was a time of record unemployment, high emigration, widespread political self-censorship in the media, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland, and mounting despair about a society whose ambitions and perspectives were dispiritingly narrow. The purpose of the … Continue reading
Peter Sirr The drawings show, in great detail, the junction of Goldsmith Street and Geraldine Street. They are architectural drawings, designed to pull us in to observe the specific details of the chosen scene. In the first we see a recessed doorway with a generous fanlight and the brickwork of the narrow porch ranged fan-like … Continue reading
