On the Town: Occasionally at the dining room table in the Yeats household, conversation would stop if Yeats, with a faraway look in his eye, suddenly began to work out the beat of a poem, silently, with a slow motion of his hand.
So recalled his only son, Michael Yeats, at the opening at the National Library, Dublin, of the Yeats: The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats exhibition.
"We wouldn't interrupt while he was composing . . . He was a distant figure in a sense," he said, recalling that he was aged just 17 when his father died in 1939.
The major exhibition, which includes notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, books, personal items, filmed reports and paintings, "covers more than Yeats the literary giant", said John O'Donoghue, the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, when he declared the exhibition open on Thursday.
"It is almost intimate with its subject in its exploration of Yeats the man, the unrequited lover, the occultist, the thinker, the philosopher, the constant questioner," O'Donoghue said.
The final blotter from Yeats's desk, with the mirror images of his last writings, is "completely moving", said Luca Crispi, one of the exhibition's six curators, a team led by Catherine Fahy.
Joe Hassett, a US trial lawyer and writer, especially loved the passports, the little pocket notebooks where Yeats kept an account of his receipts and expenses, and all the other personal items on display, for the insight they give into Yeats the man.
"Chin, round; nose, straight; complexion, fresh," he said, recalling one passport description.
Michael Yeats's wife, Gráinne, and their three daughters, Síle, Caitríona and Siobhán, were the honoured guests at the opening.
Sir John Leslie remembered Yeats "as a very colourful figure" when he visited Castle Leslie around 1930. "I was about 10. He was wearing a black cape and a big sombrero cap. I had to shake hands with him," he said.
Sir John's nephew, Mark Leslie, of Martello Media, is responsible for the design of the show, which includes the creation of audio-visual spaces featuring Yeats's London salon, his Dublin study, backstage at the Abbey, and the tower of Thoor Ballylee.
Admission to Yeats: The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats at the National Library of Ireland is free. It will run for three years.
Helping the words fly off the page
A literary festival is about "taking the words off the page and letting them fly", according to Pat Boran, the outgoing programme director of the Dublin Writers Festival.
"The joy of any literary event is very often what's said between the lines or after the event," he said. "It's about taking the words off the paper and letting them fly. You don't want a writer keeping his or her head down the whole time. It's about the sidelines people take during a reading, with comments they make, which can ignite or illuminate whole sections in books that you didn't notice the first time round."
A festival is an opportunity for that "invisible community of readers and writers" to come together, he added.
Close to 40 writers will gather over five days in June for the ninth Dublin Writers Festival. Its programme was launched at Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, this week.
Marsha Mehran will read from her novel, Pomegranate Soup, which, she explained, is about "integration, multiculturalism, about food and the language of food, and the harmony it brings".
John F Deane was at the programme launch with a copy of his recently published book, The Religion of Poetry: The Poetry of Religion, In Dogged Loyalty. It is a collection of essays looking at different poets, from John Donne up to the contemporary Waterford poet, Pádraig J Daly, Deane said.
Poet Celia de Fréine, who goes to Koper in Slovenia later this year as part of The Sea Lions, a Literature Across Frontiers programme linking six European port cities, will read at the festival. She was there with her husband, Jack Harte, whose first novel, In the Wake of the Bagger, based on his childhood experiences during the 1950s in the Irish midlands, is due out next month.
Also taking part in the festival will be Judith Mok, whose book, Gael, "is a warning for all women to always be independent sexually and financially".
Other writers at the launch included Gabriel Rosenstock, Iggy McGovern, Enda Wyley, Michael O'Loughlin, Christine Dwyer Hickey and Derry-born Sean O'Reilly, who is currently Dublin City Council writer in residence.
Dublin Writers Festival runs from Wed, Jun 14 to Sun, Jun 18. Details: 01-2227848 or www.dublinwritersfestival.com
Woman in turmoil at the Abbey
A film star, a Tony Award-nominated playwright, a senator, two Government Ministers and a sean-nós singer were among the guests packed into the Abbey this week for the opening night of Brian Friel's version of Turgenev's classic play, A Month in the Country.
They were Jonathan Rhys Meyers, star of Woody Allen's Match Point; Conor McPherson, who has just received his Tony nomination in New York for his play, Shining City; Senator Mary O'Rourke, Ministers Mary Hanafin TD and John O'Donoghue TD, and singer Maighréad Ní Dhomhnaill.
"The poor unfortunate woman is in turmoil. It must be a dreadful thing . . . an older woman falling madly in love with a younger man and losing her mind, for that is what she's doing," said broadcaster and chair of the Road Safety Authority Gay Byrne about the plight of the play's central character, Natalya Petrovna, played by Derbhle Crotty.
Turgenev "wrote this as a young man and he represents how hopeless it all is . . . It's kind of bitter-sweet. It's about the impossibility of love", explained Prof Nicholas Grene, of TCD.
"Russian literature is my favourite," said historian and writer Donal Nevin.
Others at the opening included Muriel McCarthy, keeper of Marsh's Museum, Dublin, where an exhibition of early books on exploration and discovery opened earlier this week; Dr Angela Bourke, of UCD, who is currently organising a conference on Tuiscintí Féiniúlachta/Gaelic Identities, which will run for 10 days in June; artist Amanda Coogan; Maureen Kennelly, director of Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray; Pat Rabbitte, leader of the Labour Party; and director Caroline Fitzgerald, who will direct Ulick O'Connor's Submarine, a play about Roger Casement, for Bewley's Café Theatre later this summer.
Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country, in a version by Brian Friel, runs at the Abbey until Sat, Jul 1
Operatic extremes
A comic work by Gaetano Donizetti and a dark innovative piece about a 20th- century American "middle-aged witch" will be the two contrasting showcase operas at this year's Wexford Festival Opera.
Donizetti's opera, Don Gregorio, is "a big responsibility because it's something new", said its director, Roberto Recchia. "There are bits of music that haven't been performed before, even in Donizetti's time, because they were cut . . . This is the first comic opera he wrote."
When it was first performed in Naples in 1826 it was "a big, big success", said Recchia at the Dublin launch of the festival this week.
"It's quite a farce because it's all about people being caught in situations they shouldn't be in," added set and costume designer Ferdia Murphy. "One of the characters has a penchant for women's clothing. It's quite a comedy of errors."
In contrast, Transformations, by Conrad Susa, is based on "the very tragic and funny experiences" described in the Pulitzer Prize-winning poems of Anne Sexton. As director Michael Barker-Caven explained, Sexton, whose life ended in suicide, took the Grimm fairy tales and "re-imagined them through her own experiences", describing herself in the opening lines of her book as "a middle-aged witch".
This opera's look will be "post-modern chic", explained set and costume designer, Joe Vanek.
This year's festival will run in the town's Dún Mhuire theatre, over 12 days rather then the usual 18, with two rather than three showcase operas, as the ongoing construction of the town's new theatre will not be completed until the summer of 2008.
Among those at the launch were violinist Fionnuala Hunt, the newly appointed leader of the Wexford Festival Orchestra; the Mayor of Wexford, Thomas Carr; Dorothea Dowling, chair of the Personal Injuries Assessment Board, and her friend, Dorothy Dennis; and Winni Fejne, of the Swedish Embassy. Among those who spoke at the launch was David Adler, the festival's artistic director, and Dick Roche TD, Wexford man and Minister for Environment, Heritage and Local Government, who recalled growing up to the sounds of his father "humming to Donizetti as he shaved".
Further information about Wexford Festival Opera, which runs from Wed, Oct 25 to Sun, Nov 5, can be obtained from info@wexfordopera.com or by phoning the festival office at 053-9122400