LooseLeaves: As television beamed in instant images to this office during the week of the massacre scene at the Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, on the books desk we were preparing for publication
poet John Burnside's review of Michael Longley's Collected Poems (see opposite page), with its evocation of Longley's fascination with Amish artefacts and what they stand for. As the world was seeing and hearing about the carnage, Amish parents in Lancaster County were at the scene, trying to find out what had befallen their children (they have no television on which to follow the news at home).
"The making of a lyric, as much as the making of an Amish rug or a Shaker barn, is a renewal of the real and the elusive in a world that has fallen blindly in love with the virtual and the available," writes Burnside of this thread in Longley's work. There are a number of these poems in Collected Poems, such as The Shaker Barn (from The Weather in Japan, 2000) and An Amish Rug (from Gorse Fires, 1991), which includes the lines:
As if a one-room schoolhouse were all we knew
And our clothes were black, our underclothes black,
Marriage a horse and buggy going to church
And the children silhouettes in a snowy field . . .
Of Longley, Seamus Heaney is quoted on the dustjacket of the new book as saying: "A keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders." Never did a short encomium seem more apt.
Collected Poems, by Michael Longley, will be launched in Dublin on Mon, Nov 6, at 7pm in the Board Room of the Royal College of Surgeons on St Stephen's Green. Admission is free. Details from Poetry Ireland (01-478 9974 or management@poetryireland.ie).
Poetry soon
Next year's Poetry Now International Poetry Festival in Dún Laoghaire will run from Thursday, March 29th to Sunday, April 1st and this week Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, in association with The Irish Times, announced the judging panel of the Irish Times Poetry Award 2007. The judges are Irish Times literary correspondent Eileen Battersby, teacher and critic Niall MacMonagle and poet Maurice Riordan. The award recognises the best collection of poems published by an Irish poet in 2006 and has previously been awarded to Derek Mahon and the late Dorothy Molloy. The shortlist will be announced next February and the winning collection during the Poetry Now festival on March 31st. The winner will receive €5,000.
Programme director John McAuliffe said the prize focused attention on the thriving good health of Irish poetry, as well as "engaging audiences in new conversations about writing and poetry."
www.dlrcoco.ie/arts/festival.html
Chinese Mackers
With wheeling and dealing in full flight this week at Frankfurt Book Fair, Irish publisher Steve MacDonogh, of Brandon, announced that he'd sold the Chinese rights to Ray Mac Manais's book about Mary McAleese, The Road from Ardoyne: the Making of a President.
"The potential book market in China is enormous and there have already been important indicators of a real growth in interest in international non-fiction, with Hillary Clinton's autobiography, for example, proving a great success," McDonogh said. Now they can read all about Mackers.
Spotlight on Tel Aviv
English journalist and author Linda Grant is this year's winner of the Lettre Ulysses Award for the art of literary reportage, winning $50,000 (€39,438) for her book, The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel (Virago). The book is the story of a trip Grant, a non-religious diaspora Jew, made to Tel Aviv in 2003 to explore Jewish identity and its relationship with the state of Israel. The aim of the award is to bring the themes of the nominated books to international attention, as well as to support their authors.
www.lettre-ulysses-award.org
Sterne Lecture in Clonmel
Laurence Sterne, author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, will be commemorated in Clonmel, where he was born in 1713, at the forthcoming annual
Impressions Literature Festival (October 19th to 22nd). The Sterne Lecture is a chance to outline an artistic or social concern of the speaker's choice, and on Friday, October 20th, Haifa Zangana, Iraqi novelist, journalist and former prisoner of Saddam Hussein's regime, will talk about the current state of her country. Andrew O'Hagan, Sebastian Barry, SeáO'Reilly, John F Deane and Claire Kilroy are among those attending the festival.
www.southtipparts.com