Thursday, July 26, 2007

Dedalus Press: Meet the Authors event, Balbriggan, Sept 27, 2007


In an effort to promote Irish writing and publishing to readers and writers all over Ireland, CLÉ – Irish Book Publishers’ Association, with the support of The Arts Council Touring Experiment and the Library network are delighted to continue the nationwide Publisher/Author tour with an evening in Balbriggan Library.

This event will feature Dedalus Press Publisher Pat Boran, and writers Michael Augustin and Enda Coyle-Greene, speaking at Balbriggan Library on Thursday, 27 September 2007 at 8pm.

Pat Boran will speak on various aspects of the publishing process - editing, production, marketing, sales, rights, etc. - and will be happy to answer any questions audience members may have about the business in general.

Michael Augustin and Enda Coyle-Greene will then speak on their careers as writers and their experiences of the publishing world. Both writers will then give a short reading from their work -- Michael Augustin from the recently-published selected writings, Mickle Makes Muckle, and Enda Coyle-Greene from her forthcoming debut collection of poems, Snow Negatives.

Both publisher and authors will take questions from the floor throughout the event which might be of particular interest to beginning writers and writing groups as well as to general readers.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Dedalus Profiles: John Jordan


Among titles scheduled for Spring 2007, Dedalus Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Selected Poems by John Jordan.

John Jordan (1930-88), poet and story writer, actor, broadcaster, critic, and academic at University College, Dublin, was a leading light in the literary life of Dublin from the 1950s until his death in Cardiff in June 1988. A close friend of the poet Patrick Kavanagh and of the novelist Kate O’Brien, he edited the seminal Sixties magazine Poetry Ireland and was the founding editor in the early 1980s of its successor, Poetry Ireland Review. His collected works, including Crystal Clear: Selected Prose (Lilliput Press, 2006), have been edited by poet and critic Hugh McFadden.

***

To Ms Mae West on Her 85th


What right have you?
Did you pat your platinum alps
When across the electric wire
The thrilling message came
That the pelvic muscles were tranquillized
The gluteal shivers forever fridged
That in fact (O lamentable extinction!)
Elvis had gone pop.

Or did you cable another Cadillac
To some lucky mother-doll of Christ’s
Or over caskets run your pensive eye,
Golden, placid, lined with peachy silk,
And have your self re-measured
For the last tango with the beautician
Who’ll set all curves in proper mould,
The plastic dugs on top?

I weep not for the ‘King’: he wasn’t my type.
(Well, give him some pink, false roses.)
But you, old-timer, had better go West
While the pickings (pan me a nugget, Beulah)
Are ripe. The blue jeans of yesteryear
Might yet reverence your mummy,
And e’en their grassed spawn be mesmerized.

[Vallodolid, 17 August 1977]

***

“John Jordan was conscious of the general sense of malaise that pervaded post-war Europe. Some of the poems from the 1960s and ‘70s come close to expressing a sense of weltschmerz [world-pain]… (others) are poems of pity and terror, and are truly haunting reflections on the nature of suffering, the mystery at the heart of forgiveness, and the question of redemption.”
—Hugh McFadden, from the Introduction.