Richard Murphy looks little different now from when I first met him more than two decades ago, so it's hard to believe he has just turned seventy. One of our finest poets for more than thirty years, he's also one of our most neglected. I don't know why this should be so - perhaps it's something to do with the unfashionable poise and elegance of the verse; perhaps, given his Anglo-Irish background, he can't be fitted into any easily-categorisable niche; and though he now lives in Dublin, perhaps his long sojourn in faraway Cleggan served to put him at a remove in people's minds.
There's nothing removed about the work, though, and a fine poem recently published in the New York Review Of Books shows him at the height of his powers. Even though he made his reputation with such long narrative poems as The Cleggan Disaster and The Battle Of Aughrim, it's the shorter verse, whether shockingly direct or tenderly intimate, I love the most: Ball's Cove, The Writing Lesson, The Reading Lesson, Sunup, The Glass Dump Road, Moonshine, Stone Mania, Natural Son, and the beautiful little Lullaby:
Before you'd given death a name
Like bear or crocodile, death came
To take your mother out one night.
But when she'd said her last good night
You cried, "I don't want you to go,"
So in her arms she took you too.
Anyway, today at noon, to celebrate (a bit belatedly) his birthday, there'll be a performance of The Battle Of Aughrim at the National Gallery, while tomorrow afternoon the poet will be out at the fourth Oscar Wilde Autumn School in Bray chairing a talk by David Wheatley entitled "From Ravenna to Reading Gaol: Wilde as Poet".
In the meantime, felicitations to him.
I see that Kate Cruise O'Brien has just been appointed to the board of Poolbeg Press, with which she's had a long association in various capacities.
It was Poolbeg which published her short-story collection, A Gift Horse, in 1978, and subsequently her first novel, The Home-sick Garden, in 1991, and it was Poolbeg she joined in 1993 as fiction editor, since when many novels have passed through her editorial hands on the road to publication. Indeed, given Poolbeg's phenomenal output of novels over the past few years, Kate can arguably be held responsible for at least half the new Irish novels you see in the bookshops.
Along with her new position on the board goes another title for her - that of editorial director of Poolbeg, a newly created post.
The prestigious 1997 Aristeion Prize for Translation has just been awarded to Dublin-based Hans-Christian Oeser for his German version of Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy.
The prize is given annually to a translator for "an outstanding translation of a significant work of contemporary European literature", and Oeser's translation was praised by the judges for "the fluency, inventiveness and accuracy of its description of the world-view of a severely disturbed youth".
Born in Wiesbaden in 1950, Hans-Christian Oeser has lived in Ireland since the early 1980s, teaching German language and literature at Dublin's Goethe Institute, and translating such writers as Brendan Behan, Peig Sayers, Bernard MacLaverty, Jennifer Johnston, John McGahern and John Montague.
Raymond Mescal writes from Cabinteely to ask when the final part of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy is likely to appear. "It seems a long time," he says, "since The Crossing was published."
Indeed, it does, Raymond, and I'm happy to tell you that the third book is due for publication in the US early next year - and, I would assume, soon afterwards on this side of the Atlantic.
I didn't make it along to the Mansion House on Monday night for the launch of a CD/audio cassette entitled d(15) dublin fifteen (poems of the city) and so can't explain why the people behind it seemed unable to make up their minds about what to call it and so ended up calling it three different things.
However, as you probably gather, it features a selection of poems about our capital city, and these are read by the poets who wrote them, including Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Eavan Boland, Michael Hartnett, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Paul Durcan, Paula Meehan, Theo Dorgan and Peter Sirr.
Unlike the much-hyped young British versifier Murray MacLachlan Young, nobody here has been paid a million quid for their services, but then, unlike EMI, neither the Irish Writers' Centre nor Dublin Corporation (both of whom are behind the enterprise) is exactly rolling in money. However, the poems here are a good deal more enlivening than Mr MacLachlan Young's doggerel.
John Boland is a journalist and poet