Artists, academics and friends formed the gathering for the launch of The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust, the latest book by poet Micheal O'Siadhail.
Attending with her husband, Louis Lentin, a documentary maker, and Kathleen O'Neill, who works with women drug users, Ronit Lentin was alive to the problems of representing the Holocaust. The Trinity College lecturer in Ethnic and Racial Studies has just edited Representing the Shoah for the 21st Century scheduled for publication next year. There are "far too many" representations of the Holocaust, she states. "People use the Holocaust too easily to represent all sorts of things that are not relevant, like now with the threat of Saddam Hussein. One should not use it too easily."
Playwright Bernard Farrell recalled that O'Siadhail had spoken to him "about how traumatic it was for him to do. His poetry is terribly sensitive. He's able to put his finger on ordinary, everyday crises. What he will do with the Holocaust will be very moving".
In an affecting speech, Prof David McConnell remarked on "what courage it has taken for an outsider to write poems about the Holocaust . . . the poems drove home to me the awesome responsibility that falls on all of us to understand, protect and to refine what we call civilization".
Responding to Theodor Adorno's claim that no poetry should be written after Auschwitz, Micheal O'Siadhail remembered that the German theorist went back on the statement, although it remained a central concern of his poetry.
"For me it was an extraordinary, enriching and invaluable experience, because I came out of it actually feeling stronger as a human being. If you suppress something, as a society, it comes back to haunt you. Though it's a dark journey, there is light; a light that you can only have if you face the dark."