We Need To Talk About Ireland
The May morning after Savita Day, Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times newspaper tweeted “Oh god I just remembered all the Irish novelists and playwrights. What will they do now we don’t have shame and guilt anymore? Gogo in Godot: What do...
World Poetry Day “Back Up Quick They’re Hippies”
Today, March 21st, is World Poetry Day. Yes it matters, yes poetry counts. Now grown up, semi-responsible, semi-respectable, a member of the Establishment, property owner; over breakfast in Berlin on the second day of spring I read a poem which, in fewer than...
PAD WOMEN
The film “Pad Man” is a great story about a difficult crusade. Essentially, the person who endeavoured to bring sanitary towels to all Indian woman suffered physically and emotionally, lost his spouse and was shunned….though he did not regularly bleed. This is how women...
Connections : Art In The Wild
Many long moons ago, for a few short months, Peter von Tiesenhausen and I were neighbours in an artists’ colony in Banff. Full of the joy and excitement of fertile solitude, we also gleefully indulged in interaction with the other resident souls...
Celebrate the Silence of the Snowflakes
Dreams. The re-telling of which is, I am aware, of zilch interest to anyone apart from the dreamer. However, this might elicit amusement from Corkonians of the Art+Love circle; that wide but narrow clique from the Palace and The Group via the...
Everything is Connected: Rhiannon Giddens
From The Uncle Travelling Paul Collection: For winter in Berlin, a Spring Manor House party in England, a Summer wedding in Italy, Cherry Blossom season in Hiroshima My husband, known in the family as “Uncle Travelling Paul” has a large...
CASUS BELLI
“Casus Belli”an act or situation that provokes or justifies a war. 2003. In a London cafe, Keith Nearing the anti-hero of Martin Amis’ novel “The Pregnant Widow” is reading The Times; reading about the ‘axis of evil’ war, the war purportedly provoked – but more...
This is the Difference Between Girls and Boys
Last week, in 37c temperatures beside the lake, under the Alps, it was too hot to walk barefoot on the timber deck, so donning flip flops, wielding a long handled loppers, I went out to cut for kindling the mound of branches between swimming...