THE only time I really enjoy the experience of poets. reading their own poetry is when (a) they know how to write, (b) they know how to read, and (c) the text of what they're reading is in front of me.
The first of these conditions was convincingly fulfilled bye the three poets who participated in the Introductions evening at the Winding Stair bookshop on Dublin's Ormond Quay - indeed, the reason I was there was because I had already come across individual poems by Yvonne Cullen, Nessa O'Mahony and David Wheatley and been struck by their originality.
The second condition was fitfully met. Yvonne Cullen is not yet an accomplished reader of her honest and quietly convincing poems (there's no law that says she has to be - Yeats and Eliot were terrible readers of their work - and it's somewhat more important to be able to write than to declaim), while a rather self-conscious Nessa O'Mahony tended towards the twee in her delivery of work that reminded me of Wendy Cope while retaining its own voice, if that's not a contradiction. Only David Wheatley seemed really comfortable performing before an audience, and the lighter of his poems (as well as a jolly prose poem) communicated well to an enthusiastic audience.
Given that none of these poets has been published yet in book form, the third condition wasn't an option. That being so, I thought it perhaps unwise of Mr Wheatley to deliver a poem of twenty octets - it was simply too long for a listener previously unacquainted with its shape and ideas to absorb.
But all in all the readings, deftly introduced by Theo Dorgan, were intriguing - these three young Dublin poets are very much worth keeping an eye on and on April 3rd at the same venue and at the same time (8pm) Marie MacSweeney and Celia de Freine will be among those introducing their work to a wider public.
PAM AYRES may not be your idea of a great, or even good, poet, but she certainly knows how to put her stuff across, and only a curmudgeon would deny that when she's not making you wince, she can be rather winsome - some of her verses are genuinely droll, in a Victoria Wood kind of way, if minus Ms Wood's cutting edge. Anyway, if you want to see her in action, she will begin a two-week Irish tour in the National Concert Hall on Saturday week. You can even throw your anoraks and cardigans on to the stage if you like.
UP in the Whiskey Corner, that salty dog Charles J. Haughey was launching photographer Kevin Dwyer's Ireland - Our Island Home to a packed gathering that had more than its share of other sea-loving folk.
Many of these were either denizens or lovers of Cork - hardly surprising given that Kevin Dwyer hails from the place, as does his publisher, Con Collins of the Collins Press, who was a secondary schoolteacher in Dublin before moving back to Cork city and setting up a bookshop there. He is still the proprietor of that, but in the last couple of years has also embarked on a publishing career, with a list of interesting non-fiction titles that demonstrate he is not in it solely for the money. And now he's moving on to fiction, with first novels imminent from Gerard Murphy, Pauline Bracken and Paul Roberts.
Kevin Dwyer's is not the first book to show Ireland from an airborne perspective (Benedict Kiely wrote the text to another such volume in 1985), but the large format employed by the Collins Press has resulted in some mesmerising images of Ireland's coastline. Indeed, the shots of the Aran Islands are stupendous. No picture of Charlie Haughey's island, though - probably out of bounds.
HAVING just browsed through the eighth issue of the Sligo-based literary magazine Force 10, I was saddened to hear of the untimely death of one of its writers, Martin Healy, at the age of forty. A 1994 Hennessy/Sunday Tribune award winner and a recipient of an Arts Council bursary, he had recently completed a collection of stories. In the light of all this, his story in Force 10, entitled "A Bother", is especially touching.
Perhaps you'll buy the magazine in his memory. If you do, you'll also find interesting work by such other writers as Leo Cullen, Michael Harding, Dermot Healy, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Timothy O'Grady.