Clasp is award-winning poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s first English-language collection of poems. In three sections entitled ‘Clasp’, ‘Cleave’ and ‘Clench’, Ní Ghríofa engages in a strikingly physical way with the world of her subject matter. The result is by times what one poem calls ‘A History in Hearts’, among other things an intimate exploration of love, childbirth and motherhood, and simultaneously a place of separation and anxiety. In one poem set in the boys’ home in Letterfrack, a place of undeniable terror, we see how, in the name of religion, “The earth holds small skulls like seeds”. - See more at
Clasp is award-winning poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s first English-language collection of poems. In three sections entitled ‘Clasp’, ‘Cleave’ and ‘Clench’, Ní Ghríofa engages in a…
A wonderfully diverting and stimulating entertainment. Cunningly structured and as satisfying as an intricate piece of clockwork, it plays with narrative, revels in ideas and succeeds in being both fey and sharp, detached and compassionate. At a time when fiction gives all to the tired virtual realities of sex and violence, internets, Agas and middle-class Angst, it is a brilliant reminder of the power of the imagination to surprise, delight and open windows.
A wonderfully diverting and stimulating entertainment. Cunningly structured and as satisfying as an intricate piece of clockwork, it plays with narrative, revels in ideas and…
This is the eighth volume in Dedalus's highly acclaimed European literary fantasy series and follows volumes from Austrian, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.During the nineteenth-century, Belgian literature was still largely written in the language of education, French. Then the Flemings, who inhabit the northern half of Belgium, became aware of the value of their own language, whose standardised form is, to all intents and purposes, Dutch. Modern Flemish literature was born.This anthology incorporates fantasy stories from the early twentieth century to the present day. The types of fantasy are various: horror, mysticism and magical realism being the dominant ones. One of the early authors is Felix Timmermans who started out with horror stories, but later ended up writing his inimitable Vitalist novels. Two magic realist authors stand out: Johan Daisne and Hubert Lampo. And horror is well represented by several authors including Hugo Claus, Hugo Raes and Ward Ruyslinck - all household names in Flanders.Interesting new authors include Annelies Verbeke and Peter Verhelst.
This is the eighth volume in Dedalus's highly acclaimed European literary fantasy series and follows volumes from Austrian, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Polish, Portuguese and…
The Dedalus Press series of budget pamphlets presents works by major voices in world poetry. Inger Christensen (1935 - 2009) was one of Denmark's best-known poets and was widely celebrated throughout Europe and the United States. She wrote several volumes of poetry as well as novels, plays, children's books and essays, winning many major European prizes and awards, including the prestigious Nordic Prize in 1994. Butterfly Valley is a tour de force, exploring the major themes of life, love, death and art. The form is simple yet complex, a sequence of fifteen sonnets building to a final sonnet of extraordinary power composed of lines taken from the preceding fourteen sonnets in the sequence. Life, love, art, all are transient - like the butterfly - yet beautiful, even in their ephemerality. The translator Susanna Nied is a former insructor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University in California. Her translation of Inger Christensen's alphabet won the 1982 ASF/PEN Translation Prize.
The Dedalus Press series of budget pamphlets presents works by major voices in world poetry. Inger Christensen (1935 - 2009) was one of Denmark's best-known poets and was widely…
The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy is the most ambitious and wide-ranging anthology of Dutch fiction ever to appear in English, and reads like the Who's Who of Dutch Literature, with stories by the undisputed contemporary masters such as Gerard Reve and Harry Mulisch, and classic authors such as Couperus, Van Schendel and Vestdijk, as well as many of the rising stars of the younger generation; Frans Kellendonk, A.F.TH. Van Der Heijden and P.F. Thomese.The stereotype of the Dutch that most immediately springs to mind is that of a clean, orderly, and down-to-earth people. Richard Huijing reveals the other side of this society; that of a dark netherworld of the macabre, the weird, the perverted, the violent and the fancifully impossible conjured up by a host of the finest writers in the Dutch language of the last hundred years.
The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy is the most ambitious and wide-ranging anthology of Dutch fiction ever to appear in English, and reads like the Who's Who of Dutch Literature,…
Brian Coffey was one of Ireland's all-but forgotten modernists. He came to maturity under the shadow of Joyce, and like his better-remembered friends Denis Devlin and Thomas MacGreevy, he rejected the influence of Yeats, who seemed to him dangerously irresponsible in his refusal to write "pure" poetry. Coffey cleaved instead to the French symbolists that Yeats had absorbed and moved on from, and spent a lot of time translating Mallarme - his version of Mallarme's typographically wacky "Un Coup de Des..." is one of the great out-of-print masterpieces from the sadly-missed Dolmen Press.
Coffey moved to America to teach (Maths, if you can believe it) and formed his own rather meditative idiom, which reads a little like some of the later poetry of Samuel Beckett - a spare, haunted voice. Some of his later poetry I find a little unrelieved in its spiritual extremity, though he can be sharp and aggressive in a strangely oracular way. His earliest stuff, from the 30s, is jaunty, bleak and hilarious in a way that no other Irish poet has ever achieved. He sometimes reads a little like that remarkable Australian phantom, Ern Malley. Coffey scholars value most highly the long "Missouri Sequence" from the 60s, and the later "Death of Hektor", but Coffey also wrote strange satirical works, published invariably by tiny independent presses, while the increasingly pedestrian mainstream of Irish poetry in the 70s and 80s simply ignored him. (He was nearly left out of the Faber Book of Irish Verse, but some younger poets implored the editor to include him. Thomas Kinsella's Oxford anthology ignores him completely, an omission for which Kinsella should be ashamed.)
His translations are highly eccentric and almost quixotically faithful to the original. They are not creative translations - he doesn't do to Mallarme or Nerval what Paul Schmidt did to Rimbaud, but rather tries to retain some of the weird music of the originals in a ruthlessly un-English idiom. Nabokov would've loved him.
Coffey's influence is alive today in the highly interesting and very hard-to-find strain of postmodernist Irish poetry. He can make more voluminous and big-voiced poets like Kinsella or John Montague seem like waffling frauds. The elegant games of Derek Mahon seem trivial compared to his gravity and concision. He is far above the mediocrity of a Michael Longley or a Paul Durcan. He died in 1994 - belatedly and posthumously honoured. He was and is a gem.
Brian Coffey was one of Ireland's all-but forgotten modernists. He came to maturity under the shadow of Joyce, and like his better-remembered friends Denis Devlin and Thomas…
