Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Twice Blest
Mercy, by Joan Silber, Counterpoint, 256 pp, $27, ISBN: 978-1640097070 There are some writers whose stories make you feel as if you are gently rafting down a river, watching the scenery drift by. Penelope Fitzgerald. William Maxwell. Tessa Hadley. The journey is seemingly effortless, the landscape deceptively typical. Until you pay careful attention. Until you…
A Fruitful Reticence
Vinegar Hill, by Colm Tóibín, Carcanet, 144 pp., £12.99, ISBN: 978-1800171619 The Poems (1961-2020), by Derek Mahon, The Gallery Press, 532 pp., £19.50, ISBN: 978-1911338048 On Elizabeth Bishop, by Colm Tóibín, Princeton University Press, 210 pp., £14.99, ISBN: 978 0691154114 Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pp., £14.99, ISBN: 978-0374125585 Selected Poems,…
The Thing with Rivers
Is a River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane. Hamish Hamilton, 374 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241624814 Incubating the Trout. The Story of the Oldest Salmonid Hatchery in the World and the Environmental Fight to Protect It, by Kevin Prunty, Book Hub Publishing, 72 pp, €12, ISBN: 978-1068649073 Like Bedřik Smetana’s symphonic poem The Moldau, this book opens…
Appointment
Johnny Lyons writes: I am thrilled to take up the role of managing editor with the drb, a journal of which I have long been an avid reader and to which, in more recent times, I have been a proud contributor. The drb has made an incalculable contribution to Irish intellectual life and I intend…
Fascism in America
The ghost of Karl Marx is haunting America again. This time it is galvanising a far-right revolution that has traumatised everyone in America (with the likely exception of those inside the MAGA movement) and shocked people elsewhere who thought they ‘knew’ America. This includes those of us who have lived, studied and worked there and…
The Monad Unchained
The Nazis conducted their genocide in secret, and took pains to ensure that this secrecy would survive the war. After the failed prisoner uprising of August 2nd, 1943 – when it was already clear to every sentient German that the war was as good as lost – the SS set about dismantling the death factory…
A ‘Sublime’ Friendship
Richard Wollheim I don’t expect to agree with, but then he doesn’t expect to agree with me. We are on very good terms, but then again he is rather a maverick. He also doesn’t have very many allies. He is very much a man on his own. Isaiah Berlin They were indeed potentially quite incompatible….
A Crack in the Cosmos
Some time around the year 466 BCE – in the second year of the 78th Olympiad, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder tells us – a massive meteor blazed across the sky in broad daylight, crashing to the earth with an enormous explosion near the small Greek town of Aegospotami, or ‘Goat Rivers’, on the…
Different Colonisations
There’s a Monster behind the Door, by Gaëlle Bélem, trans Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, Bullaun Press, 176 pp, €14.95, ISBN: 978-1739842369 The Rarest Fruit, by Gaëlle Bélem, trans Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, Bullaun Press, 224 pp, €14.95, ISBN: 978-1739842383 There’s a Monster behind the Door is a propulsive picaresque tale of a young…
A Long Way to Peace
Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, Volume XIV, 1969-1973, eds Michael Kennedy, Eunan O’Halpin, Kate O’Malley, Bernadette Whelan, Kevin O’Sullivan, Jennifer Redmond, John Gibney and Melissa Baird, Royal Irish Academy, 1,122 pp, €50, ISBN: 978-1802050219 In one way it was the best of times: the last document in this fourteenth volume of Documents on Irish Foreign…
G’wan the Normies!
Here’s a question. If the Normans, with whom it is has been claimed all our troubles began, were playing Transnistria, or some other faraway land, should we be up for the Normans? Well no, of course not! But hold on … maybe we should. After all, there are Norman surnames all around us. Aengus Ó…
A Jewish Patriot
An Irish-Jewish Politician, Joyce’s Dublin, and Ulysses: The Life and Times of Albert L. Altman, by Neil R Davison, University Press of Florida, 173 pp, $85, ISBN: 978-0813069555 Albert Altman (1853-1903) was born in what he called ‘Prussian Poland’ (probably the Duchy of Posen, which had a large Jewish population) and came to Ireland most…