Loose Leaves SadhThe centenary of the birth of Molly Keane will be marked by a conference at University College, Cork. The Molly Keane Centenary Conference, which will be addressed by her daughters, Sally Phibbs and Virginia Brownlow, opens next Friday and continues throughout Saturday.
The keynote address will be given by Cork poet and novelist Thomas McCarthy. Academics from locations as far away as Santa Barbara, Pretoria and Pennsylvania - as well as many home-grown ones - will attend the event, which is organised by the Department of English. Among Keane's works that will be scrutinised are Mad Puppetstown, Time After Time, Devoted Ladies and Good Behaviour, with work by other writers such as Sommerville and Ross and Elizabeth Bowen also on the agenda. Predictably, the subject of the Irish Big House will also feature. A charge of €5 will apply.
For details, e-mail Eibhear Walshe (e.walshe@ucc.ie) or Gwenda Young (g.young@ucc.ie) or contact the Department of English, University College, Cork, tel: 021-4902241.
Poets: the video
Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Dennis O'Driscoll, John Montague, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Brendan Kennelly, Louis de Paor, Rosita Boland, Rita Ann Higgins, Moya Cannon and Paul Muldoon are among poets who feature in filmed interviews for a Poetry Ireland series called The Poet's Chair to be launched later this month.
Considered to be an archive for future generations, the series is also an invaluable educational resource for Leaving Cert students. The
interviews, conducted by Mary Shine Thompson, Alan Titley and Joseph Woods, will be available in free VHS format to secondary schools. New poets will be added to the archive each year. For more details, contact Poetry Ireland on tel: 01- 4789974 or e-mail poetry@iol.ie. Website: www.poetryireland.ie
Young voices
One hundred poems by young people in the Border region inspired by Patrick Kavanagh form the contents of Borderlines 4. Published by Co Monaghan Vocational Education Committee, the magazine is edited by writer Leland Bardwell. All the poems included have either won or been shortlisted for a Kavanagh Schools Poetry Award. As the 21st century evolves, writes Bardwell in her introduction, the world doesn't seem to know what road to take; it is left for us to listen to the poets . "Lectures and rhetoric no longer fill the bill - art is essential for the survival of the human consciousness." This, she says, is what makes an anthology such as this important. "It gives us the chance to listen to what the new generation has to tell us through their verse." For further information, tel: 047-30888 or e-mail monaghanvec@eircom.net
Joycean nibbles
Giblet soup, nutty gizzards, pungent mustard fried bread and feety-smelling cheeses will be among the subjects up for discussion at what's billed as a culinary tour through the work of James Joyce at the James Joyce Centre,
35 North Great George's Street, Dublin 1, on Sunday, December 5th, at 3 p.m.
The tour will be given by Fionnuala O'Reilly, co-author of An Irish Literary Cookbook. Admission is free.
Details from 01-8788547 or e-mail bookings@jamesjoyce.ie
In praise of Hobsbaum
Catalyst, polariser, imposing personality, living almanac of British poetry in the 20th century, animateur and encourager of others: these are just some of the descriptions of poet and academic Philip Hobsbaum in a major piece about him by Gerry Cambridge in issue number 15 of THE SHOp poetry magazine.
Hobsbaum is remembered in Ireland mainly for the time he spent in the 1960s as a lecturer at Queen's University in Belfast, where he founded the famous writing group that included Seamus Heaney, Bernard MacLaverty and others. He mingled with writers as far back as the 1950s, when he knew Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Cambridge. In the late 1960s he established another writers' group in Scotland, which included Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and Liz Lockhead. He still lives in Glasgow. Talking of him as a reviewer, Cambridge says Hobsbaum is rare in that he doesn't consider a review simply glorified punditry. "His reviewing and criticism have all the rigour and asperity of the best of his poems." He is, adds Cambridge, a writer who can be relied on to say what he thinks, unintimidated by reputation or consensus.
THE SHOp, Issue 15, costs €7