Liberty Hall E-Book

Michael O'Loughlin

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Michael O'Loughlin was seven years old when the Irish trade union movement replaced its headquarters, Liberty Hall – the starting point of the 1916 Rising – with Ireland's first skyscraper. This bold, seventeen-storey Liberty Hall expressed an aspiration towards the modernity which its builders envisaged as the birthright of future generations. Since then, as one of Dublin's most iconic buildings, Liberty Hall has cast a personal and political light on the lives of citizens passing below, and formed the backdrop to O'Loughlin's earliest childhood memories. In this remarkable new book – a highly original fusion of poetry, visual images and prose memoirs – Liberty Hall becomes both a real and imaginary space, a physical building and a state of mind in which to be free; a place where the boundaries between verbal and visual, poetry and prose, past and present, city and suburb, local and global, all become fluid. It is a book of numerous journeys: the ritualised crossing of the Liffey from North to South and back again; travels around European cities; and into O'Loughlin's own family history in the first difficult century of the Irish state. He explores the emotional weather through memory, cinema and architecture, arriving in the end at Liberty Hall.

Leseprobe

Praise forPoems 1980–2015

‘These poems from three and a half decades constitute European poetry in the mask of English, and they are a unique addition to the Capital of Letters.’ —The Irish Times

‘And it has to be said that the conversation extended throughout these poems; on how to be a poet, on what is a poem, on what can a poem handle – as well as the poems themselves – places O’Loughlin deservedly within the canon of contemporary Irish poetries.’ —The Dublin Review of Books

‘O’Loughlin directly links back to Dublin’s first truly great Dublin poet, James Clarence Mangan. Mangan was not a keeper but a breaker of tradition, the ultimate nonconformist and dissident. O’Loughlin has inherited this mantle of being a maverick writer of ideas rather than a peddler of local colour. Few writers have written so accurately and so unsentimentally about Dublin, in a tone equally at home and displaced in all cultures.’ —The Sunday Business Post

‘A writer or poet, Cyril Connolly once said, should be aware, as far as possible, of his or her ‘latent curve of development’. That curve in O’Loughlin, through the angers and distractions of the years, looks increasingly like the circle Kavanagh describes, returning upon itself, but knowingly.’ —Poetry Ireland Review

Photograph © Ellius Grace

MICHAEL O’LOUGHLIN was born in Dublin in 1958 and studied at Trinity College Dublin. He has published six collections of poetry, including Another Nation: New and Selected Poems (1996), In This Life (2011) and Poems 1980–2015 (2017). He has published numerous translations, critical essays and reviews, as well as writing screenplays and journalism. His poems have been widely anthologised and translated. He has been Writer in Residence in Galway City and County, Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and was UNESCO City of Literature Writer in Residence in Prague in 2017. From 1980 to 2002 he lived in Barcelona and Amsterdam, and now lives in Dublin with his wife, the singer and writer Judith Mok. He is a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of artists in Ireland.

For Judith and Saar

LIBERTY HALL

Michael O’Loughlin

LIBERTY HALL

First published in 2021 by

New Island Books

Glenshesk House

10 Richview Office Park

Clonskeagh

Dublin 14, D14 V8C4

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Michael O’Loughlin, 2021

The right of Michael O’Loughlin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978–1–84840–797–8

eBook ISBN: 978–1–84840–798–5

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

All effort has been made to seek permission to reproduce images herein. Any breaches, omissions or errors should be made known to the publisher directly.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíonn), Dublin, Ireland

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

Contents

I

The Names of the Rat

What I Had Overlooked

Days of 1982

To Those Who Come After

Summer in Andorra

Sleeping in Prague

Leonard Cohen

A Dutch Life

Muse

For Saar on Her Sixteenth Birthday

Deutschland 1975

The Hyperlocal

Rue des Irlandais

Bastille Day, Labastide, 2007

Beuys

Falling

The Angle of the World

II

Transpontine

Liberty Hall

Appendix: Meridian

Acknowledgements