Review: Namanlagh by Tom Paulin (Faber and Faber, 2025) The “power to think / has clean left me”, Tom Paulin claims – not quite convincingly – in his sharply observant new poetry collection, Namanlagh, which chronicles the author’s experience of crippling depression and advancing age. “Have I at last started to climb out / of … Read more
Gaza’s history since the Nakba of 1948 is punctuated by waves of forced displacement. The enclave has been the epicentre of Palestinian refugees since 1948, having welcomed Palestinians from all over the colonised territories. Since Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza began in October 2023 its entire population of over two million, in a territory … Read more
U.S. citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were detained and executed in Chile during the early days of the US-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Investigative reporter and author John Dinges, who has written extensively about Latin America and Operation Condor, investigates the earlier premise that both men were murdered by the Chilean military upon direct … Read more
How would you feel upon discovering the objects of your daily, habitual use—ordinary objects of every imaginable function and variety—were inspirited, sensitively keen observers with their own desires, gripes, preoccupations, and ways of understanding the world? This is precisely the brain-tickling puzzle Jennifer Maier’s newly-released third collection The Occupant (University of Pittsburgh Press) shakes, opens, … Read more
If you count my two unsuccessful (all cough no high) undergraduate attempts to smoke weed and the later (nominally) more successful fractal bits of gummy I consumed (once) at a wedding reception, you must grant I possessed sufficient knowledge and experience with recreational imbibing to feel I was setting myself up for an evening of … Read more
“Trump Inhabits Trumpistan”, writes Chris Agee in his rampaging poetic satire, Trump Rant: “Trump Is the Wolf of Washington”. Written over a four-year period from 2017 onwards, and arranged as an expanding series of mock-newspaper headlines, Agee’s book begins as an act of stinging personal portraiture and ends as a thorough-going investigation of America itself … Read more
Few writers can do grief and loss like John MacKenna. He is, without question, the John McGahern of the ‘Ancient East’. Where McGahern has put the villages and drumlins of Leitrim along the inland cusp of the ‘Wild Atlantic Way’ at the heart of his writing, the landscape of South Kildare, and its surroundings are … Read more
Some viewers have noticed the numberplate on the Ford Cortina in That They May Face the Rising Sun, the recent film based on John McGahern’s 2002 novel of the same name. The plate reads ‘OZU 155’. Surely this is a reference to the Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu? In interview, the director, Pat Collins, has said … Read more
Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense is a recently published work by Irish philosopher and public intellectual Richard Kearney. The book is the third in the ‘No Limits’ series published by Columbia University Press. The blurb and introduction promise a timely meditation on the importance of touch in an age of virtuality. The book, we … Read more
Picture the scene: the small backyard of a tiny working-class pub in Belfast at around 8pm on a dark Autumn night. I am smoking with a friend, older by a few years, and with way more life experience, talking about books. A dim-light is ebbing away, further subdued by the frosted glass of the bar-door. … Read more
