LooseLeaves Caroline WalshMaurice Riordan's poetry collection The Holy Land is this year's winner of the Michael Hartnett Award. Born in Lisgoold, Co Cork and now living in London where he teaches at Imperial and Goldsmith colleges, The Holy Land is the third book of poetry from Riordan (right), the previous ones being A Word from the Loki (1995) and Floods (2000).
The judges were poets Michael Coady, Theo Dorgan and Gerard Smyth. To Dorgan, The Holy Land was one of the most satisfying books he had read in years: "It is something of a departure for Maurice Riordan, a sustained meditation on the bond between father and son, and a considered and moving invocation of a home place. The poems are deftly handled, lyrical and restrained but made powerful and ultimately convincing by the evocation of unironised love. The lucid prose pieces balance the poems beautifully; he gives us one voice in two registers, and that voice carries an earned authority, a delight in language and its powers."
Smyth found the collection tightly controlled, elegiac in tone, a beautiful union of memory and language that was also memorable for its vivid observation. "These poems are acts of recovery and remembrance that reach back, with tenderness and some yearning, to a landscape and its community." Coady said: "This is a work of memorable artistic integrity that confirms the unique and ageless power of poetry to reach towards the very heart of human life, its light, its half-light and its dark." The work's verities and mysteries were timeless. "In essence it becomes an act of love."
The €6,350 award is jointly funded by Limerick County Council and the Arts Council. Previous winners include Julie O'Callaghan, Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey and Paddy Bushe. The prize will be presented on September 20th at the opening night of Éigse Michael Hartnett in Newcastle West, Co Limerick. Events will be held in the library, schools, castle, hospital and pubs. John Waters, Leanne O'Sullivan, Catherine Phil McCarthy, Nuala O'Faolain, Penny Perrick, John W Sexton and Christine Dwyer Hickey are among those participating this year.
The autumnal onslaught
As the rainy summer proceeds relentlessly, anything exciting on the horizon looms large. High on the list are three new novels from heavyweights JM Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje and Philip Roth. First up, in early September, will be Diary of a Bad Year from Nobel laureate and two-time Booker winner Coetzee. The South African writer, who now lives in Australia, is offering a tale of an Australian writer who, asked to contribute to a book of essays on the individual and the state, addresses how citizens in a modern democracy should react to the state's willingness to set aside civil liberties in its war on terror. Meanwhile, there's the attractive young woman - girlfriend of a neo-liberal investment consultant - who the writer tempts into working for him. It's published by Harvill Secker.
In mid-September, Sri Lankan-born Ondaatje, who lives in Canada and won the Booker for The English Patient weighs in with Divisadero (Bloomsbury), the story of a North Carolina family, a father and two teenage daughters, who work the land with Coop, the enigmatic young man who lives with them. The makeshift family is riven by a violent incident that casts shadows which one daughter, later in faraway France, can't leave behind.
But top on his fans' list will be the appropriately titled Exit Ghost by American master Roth (left) - the last, we're told, of the novels featuring his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. It's nearly 30 years since the first one, The Ghost Writer (1979) and, says publisher Jonathan Cape, if that was a portrait of the artist as a young man, Exit Ghost is a portrait of an old one. "Bedevilled by the powers he's lost, fearful of losing the powers that remain - and that are vital to his vocation - Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after 11 years of living as a solitary, reclusive writer in the rural hills of western Massachusetts. His encounters in New York with a new generation of writers and with an old, dying friend produce the revelations that gravely unsettle him," says Cape, flagging the volume as "a moving study of obsession, forgetfulness, resignation and ungratifiable desire". Roll on October.
Gulliver is back in town
Jonathan Swift could be in for a comeback with the announcement by Dublin City Libraries that Gulliver's Travels will be the book featured throughout the capital in its Dublin: One City One Book promotion next year. Last year's title was Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way. See www.dublinonecityonebook.ie.