OPENING NIGHT: This is being launched at 7pm 9th April in Customs House by writer and performer Laurence Foster
9th April, 7pm, FREE
Customs House, Dublin 1
Martin Incidentally by Gerry McDonnell is a novella in which the chapters can also be read as short stories in themselves. From the apprentice compositor – standing in the ‘case room’ where cases of font were made to produce galley proof etc. – to the author huddled by the fire in a freezing house, we wander through transforming experiences.
With that former apprentice, now reading his own published work, the reader is taken through a fractured narrative in which fact and imagination, memory and fiction are gathered like type metal fonts into the ghost of pages past.
Ireland Is Changing Mother is the latest collection from Rita Ann Higgins: provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinx, jittery grief and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of the Irish dispossessed.
“A brilliantly spiky, surreal blend of humour and social issues.” Ruth Padel, The Independent on Sunday
“Higgins’s voice, forged over 25 years…has a unique fusion of wry, deadpan humour on the one side and absolute sincerity on the other... Now the bubble’s burst, we’re left with our real treasures, and Rita Ann Higgins is one of them. ”Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times
Meehan’s Wounded Streets of Dublin - "Few poets have engaged so convincingly with the complexity of city life, as Paula Meehan". writes Pat Boran
Home: It is not always a charmed place in Meehan's poetry but it is where a great deal of her best work has its originated.
Paula Meehan's explicit Dublin poetry reveals, like so much poetry inspired by a place, something of a love-hate relationship, the love ever directed towards its citizens, victims and survivors alike (the ubiquitous buddleia of the city’s back lanes is described in one poem as 'shrub tough and tenacious as your indigenous Dub'. You may discern darker feelings reserved for those who might plan the destruction of a local field in the name of progress, as in her most recent book, or overlook (if not oversee) the heroin blight of the 1980s.Though a champion of the liberating and, in the truest sense, mind-expanding power of poetry, the Dublin-born Meehan has always balanced these energies with a movement back towards origin and home, a place that seems for her at once a kind of earthing spot and an impossible Eden.
From the title poem of her first book in 1984, Return and No Blame, Meehan has been journeying out and back, increasingly aware of the interplay of cosmic forces in her life (her second book was entitled Reading the Sky)but so often returning to a place where happiness eluded her first-time round as if the orbit of her journey were somehow fated and, therefore, a thing to be accepted. If the Irish word for poem, dán, also means gift, many aspects of the making of poetry are simply givens and the best poets accept them as such.
To mark Strumpet City's selection as this year's One City One Book
14th April, 7pm, Ticket €10Sean O'Casey Theatre, East Wall, Dublin 3
Dublin’s best balladeers, Fergus Whelan, Jimmy Kelly and Fergus Russell sing rousing ballads of the time. Jer O’Leary is an actor and banner – maker, living in the North Strand. Mick O’Reilly, President of the Dublin Council of Trade Unions talks with Jer, as a slide show of his banners depict how he was influenced by Larkin’s writings.
Extracts read by drama students, Marino College.
This adaptation of the book, by Mary Enright, presents vignettes of dramatic tensions encountered by the characters, yet retains all the descriptive language of the author. This is married skilfully with factual accounts of many strikes of the time. Even the ballads echo the experience of the tough life of bosses and the labour force at the end of the 19th century.
23rd April, 8 pm, Admission Free The Green Room Bar, Sheriff Street, Dublin 1 Audience: Adults
Bernard Burns: Saxophone
Fiona Dowling: Stories
Folktales about Love from Iran, Kenya, Cameroon, Morocco, France and Spain.
"Come and hear our musical and mystical stories of romance, heart-to-hearts and skipping beats. Listen between the lines for echoes of ancient wisdom from the Moroccan souk and the Persian bazaar. Once upon a Boom Boom there was the human heart, still hungry today for tales of its own working".
Saturday 27th April, 11 am, Charleville Mall Library, Admission Free
The Theatre Royal Remembered.
A trip down memory lane remembering Dublin's much loved and long lost Theatre Royal.
Memories, songs, music and stories of the Irish and International performers who have appeared on this famous stage, family and friendsof people who worked there but more importantly Dubliner’s who were patrons of the biggest theatre in Europe at the time!
