This year is the 30th anniversary of poetry publishers Carcanet, who have recently won the Sunday Times Small Publisher of the Year Award 2000/2001. As part of the celebrations, they have just published a wee book, like a birthday card. Called, disarmingly, A Commonplace Book, Carcanet 1970-2000 (£4.95 in the UK), it has prose and poetry contributions from some 50 of its writers, including Eavan Boland, Thomas Kinsella, Greg Delanty, John Ashberry, Frank Kermode, Robert Pinsky, Auberon Waugh, Harold Pinter, Les Murray and Louis de Bernieres.
In June 1996, Carnacet's offices at the Corn Exchange were destroyed in the Manchester bomb. It was a Saturday, so nobody on the staff was hurt, but the damage to everything else was absolute. Two weeks later, Carcanet's publisher Michael Schmidt was allowed a few minutes in the unsafe building to salvage one item of sentimental value for each member of staff, and more prosaically, the hard disk with their accounts.
Happily, phoenix-like, Carcanet arose from the ashes and thrives still in Manchester. Alison Brackenbury employs a more humble bird to do the revival job in her tribute poem, "Carcanet: a pigeon's eye view"
From my thick sill I saw the books.
The books were black. The books were green.
I saw the window burst by blast.
I flew in where the books had been.
Then, as I dozed, I saw the books.
The books were green. The books were black.
I saw the pages arch, then preen,
Whirr up like wings. The books flew back.
A little book of a different kind entirely landed on Sadbh's desk this week - The Little Buke of Dublin (or How to be a Real Dub), by David Kenny, New Island Books (£4.99). Sadbh, neither a real or false Dub herself, has been looking through it with amusement to see what hints and information the tourists are getting. New to Sadbh are the following words of Dublin argot: coolah boolah, I concur with enthusiasm; battle cruiser, boozer; boxing the fox, stealing apples from orchards; and several others of a nature not suitable for reproduction in a family newspaper. The following gem is irresistible, however. The section on world cup soccer concludes with the observation: "The memory of Jack's Army still remains," while a footnote helpfully informs us: "The fans were so named because of the huge number of them charging to the toilets at half-time."
The Forward Prize shortlists for 2000 have just been announced. The Forward Prizes are now in their ninth year and are Britain's biggest bag of loot for poetry. Books published in Ireland are also eligible. On the shortlist for the £10,000 Best Collection prize are: Matthew Sweeney, A Smell of Fish; Kathleen Jamie, Jizzen; Douglas Dunn, The Donkey's Ears; Michael Donaghy, Conjure; and John Burnside, The Asylum Dance. There is also an Irish interest in the £5,000 Waterstone's Prize for First Collection, with Colette Bryce's The Heel of Bernadette making the list. Prizewinners will be announced on October 4th, the day before National Poetry Day.
Wolfhound Press, tells Sadbh that they will be publishing Vincent Dowling's autobiography, A Theatrical Life, in October. Dowling, a previous artistic director of the Abbey, undoubtedly has many tales to tell, and tell them he will. Sadbh is told the book "doesn't shy away from the more contentious and controversial aspects of Dowling's career and details the feuds, Machiavellian intrigue, and backstabbing which went on behind the scenes". If it delivers what it promises, it's bound to be as eagerly read among Ireland's theatrical folk as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was by younger folk not long ago.