Poet and story writer, actor, broadcaster, critic and one-time academic at University College, Dublin, John Jordan (1930-88) was a leading light in the literary life of Dublin from the 1950s until his death in Cardiff in June 1988. A close friend of the poet Patrick Kavanagh and of the novelist Kate O'Brien, he edited the seminal '60s magazine Poetry Ireland and was the founding editor in the early 1980s of its successor, Poetry Ireland Review. His collected works, including Crystal Clear: Selected Prose (Lilliput Press, 2006), have been edited by his literary executor, the poet and critic Hugh McFadden. "John Jordan was conscious of the general sense of malaise that pervaded post-war Europe. Some of the poems from the 1960s and '70s come close to expressing a sense of weltschmerz. Others] are poems of pity and terror, and are truly haunting reflections on the nature of suffering, the mystery at the heart of forgiveness, and the question of redemption." -from the Introduction

Writer, poet, lecturer, broadcaster and man-of -letters, John Jordan (1930-88) was a distinguished scholar-critic in the Dublin of his day, teaching English at University College Dublin (1955-66) and at the Memorial University of Newfoundland at St John's (1966-7). A true cosmopolitan, and formidably read, his interests ranged from drama to literature in all its forms. This gathering of prose essays and reviews are taken from the columns of the Irish Press, Hibernia, The Crane Bag and Irish University Review and Poetry Ireland (a magazine he refounded in 1962), as well as from private unpublished papers. They focus on the mid-century canon of Irish and Anglo-American writing: Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot, Kavanagh, O'Casey, Behan, Clarke, Stuart, Bowen, Gregory, Synge, Shaw and Wilde, as well as on the new voices of a succeeding generation: Kinsella, Cronin, Hutchinson, Heaney, and Durcan. With occasional literary detours to Russia, France and Spain, Jordan brings a continental sensibility to bear on his literary milieu.