Wing beats of a wild duck Startled by my unlit prescence Drum into my consciousness A moment framed in time. I am again before a dark city lake On a winter’s evening Behind me the half-heard sound Of Hamburg’s traffic. Before me an emptiness of water And space, unfilled by you.
Fred Astaire When I was nineteen I laughed At what I heard people call your “Art”. Art! Like Joyce or Jean Paul Sarte? No. I had you firmly in a bracket. Somewhere between Elvis Presley And Bob Cratchet. But when I was thirty-eight And it was a wet Sunday afternoon And the pubs were shut. […]
New York – a poem by Tom Brace ‘ Driven by necessity, man can achieve
Elevation in a confined space
And in a place of Babel reach the sky…’
The romantic view of terrorists as misfits and lost souls, presented by Dostoevsky and Conrad in their work, is very much at odds with the practical and structured guerilla warfare that was seen during Ireland’s War of Independence
In a hitherto neglected area of study, Dr Rory Miller of King’s College at the University of London, adresses the history of the relationship between Ireland and the Palestine Question.
“Longley hasn’t advertised himself as a Muse-poet, but that is what he is, a love poet, and a nature poet, a celebrant of the female principle; and like Graves he is also a war poet, of the two world wars in which his father fought, and of the war of nerves in Northern Ireland, where […]
I was anxious to meet Brendan Kennelly, the internationally renowned poet and for almost 40 years Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. Not only to conduct this interview with him for Three Monkeys, but finally to ask him the meaning of a phrase I had heard him use many years ago when I […]
In dealing with the subject of women in Seán O’Casey’s plays, it is revealing to refer to the influence of women on Sean O’Casey’s early life. O’Casey’s father died when he was a young child and he was brought up by his mother and educated at home by his sister, who was a schoolteacher. In […]
Ever since, as James Joyce remarked, we have become “Jung and easily Freudened” it has become necessary, when dealing with a writer, to refer not only to his work but to his private life as well. This is particularly true in the case of Seán O'Casey, one of Ireland's great literary icons. In fact, O'Casey […]
June 1904, the month in which the novel Ulysses is set, is a month that brings to mind the name of James Joyce and that name has become synonymous with that of the city of Dublin. The Sandycove Martello Tower, Sandymount Strand, Dublin’s North inner city: these have become known as ‘Joycean Dublin’. Indeed, a […]
