Way of Peace
How small events can change the course of our lives This is a poem I wrote thirty years ago, give or take. I like to think I’d do it better today, but it still contains something that was a lesson to me then, and still speaks to me now. Back in the 1970s, like a lot of […]
Audio: The Pre-Electric Picnic
THE CANCELLATION of this year’s Electric Picnic means the highlight of many people’s autumn calendar – and a huge source of income for so many in Stradbally, Co. Laois, and beyond – has been lost for another year. Perhaps it’s been online all the time, but by an odd coincidence I was directed just now […]
Siouxsie and the Banshees, Cabra, 1980
Punk rockers Siouxsie and the Banshees’ legendary gig in a local cinema in Cabra, north Dublin in 1980 is the subject – or part of it, at least – of my contribution to Sunday Miscellany’s 50th, a half-centenary celebration of the radio show that has long been an Irish institution. The recording made at Dublin’s […]
Lost and Found: The Afterlife of a Poem
It’s odd how some poems set out, as it were, in the company of their peers, but quickly discover a very different path through the world. Though I didn’t think much of it at the time (and certainly not more than those which accompanied it), the poem ‘Lost and Found’ from my 2011 collection As […]
Seamus Heaney: An Appreciation
WHEN HE READ as part of the 2006 Dublin Writers Festival, Seamus Heaney shared the bill with the relatively unknown (to Irish readers, at least) Dutch poet Rutger Kopland, who passed away last year. At the time I was Programme Director of the DWF and pleased to have secured the participation of a poet I […]
As innocently as he had seen it first: an appreciation of Dennis O’Driscoll
AT THE HEART of the late Dennis O’Driscoll’s poetry is a quiet astonishment at the way we manage to live our lives, despite knowing what lies in store for us at the end, whether that end will come as a bang or as a whimper. From his debut collection of poems, Kist (a typical O’Driscoll […]
An Unusual Name
This is a recording of a short prose piece entitled ‘An Unusual Name’, concerning the reputed origins of the name ‘Boran’ and the name of my late father’s Travel Agency at no. 74 Main Street, Portlaoise IS IT A BLESSING or a curse to have an unusual name? In the Boran family mythology, for example, […]