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The gripping story of the tumultuous destruction of the Irish
country house, spanning the revolutionary years of 1912 to 1923
 During the Irish Revolution nearly three hundred country
houses were burned to the ground. These âBig Housesâ were
powerful symbols of conquest, plantation, and colonial oppression
and were caught up in the struggle for independence and the
conflict between the aristocracy and those demanding access to more
land. Stripped of their most important artifacts, most of the
houses were never rebuilt, and ruins such as Summerhill stood like
ghostly figures for generations to come. Â Terence Dooley
offers a unique perspective on the Irish Revolution, exploring the
struggles over land, the impact of the Great War, and why the
country mansions of the landed class became such a symbolic target
for republicans throughout the period. Dooley details the
shockingly sudden acts of occupation and destructionâincluding
soldiers using a Rembrandt as a dart boardâand evokes the
exhilaration felt by the revolutionaries at seizing these grand
houses and visibly overturning the established order.
How societies use the past is one of their most revealing traits.
Using this insight "Ireland's Polemical Past" examines how the
inhabitants of nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland plundered
their pasts for polemical reasons. The ten essays explore how
revolutionaries, politicians, churchmen, artists, tourists and
builders (among others) used the Irish past in creating and
justifying their own position in contemporary society. The result
is a varied portrait of the problems and tensions in nineteenth and
early twentieth-century society that these people tried to solve by
resorting to the Irish past for inspiration and justification to
make their world work. This is a book that will appeal to those who
have an interest in the making of modern Ireland as well as those
concerned with writing about the Irish past at any level.
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Master of Distances
Jordi Doce; Translated by Terence Dooley
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R504
R440
Discovery Miles 4 400
Save R64 (13%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Master of Distances consists of a hundred or so prose fragments
fluctuating between dream, nightmare and a harsh reality: the
bleakness of ageing, and accompanying the loved one through a long
and debilitating illness. The continuity of mood and imagery
gradually melds the fragments into a single poem. The poet stumbles
confusedly as through a labyrinth of feeling and sensation. Who or
what is the mysterious master of distances of the title? Time?
Language? Oneself? The answer is a radical experiment in poetry and
a new departure for this fine lyric poet. "Jordi Doce is one of the
three or four living European poets whose work I most treasure. He
brings all his faculties to the rich task of being; his voice
inhabits the names, not just with wonder, but with new
possibilities; [...] he is a companion, not a guide, always present
with us, never merely pointing what he thinks might be the way."
âJohn Burnside "One of the most striking elements of We Were Not
There is that feeling of collaborative concern, that awareness of
commonality, the record of experiences that permits us to recognise
our common humanity." âIan Brinton, Tears in the Fence "Few
modern poets are better able to make us rethink our everyday
purposes and perceptions." âBrian Morton, PN Review Praise for
Master of Distances: "The book is further evidence of Doce's deeply
personal lyrical journey, blending realism and metaphysics, an
attention to the visible and lived with the imaginary and symbolic,
the many faces of emotion with the bristling edges of thought."
âManuel Rico, El Pais
" 'Fear is the liquid state of / pain as a wound is the solid state
of / fear.' Mariano Peyrou's pulsating and mesmerizing meditation
on love, time, and memory, here elegantly translated by Terence
Dooley, is at once minimalist and expansive: its subtle repetition
of key nouns and verbs creates a dreamscape in which 'two parallel
lines meet / in your eyes.' If parallel, how can these lines meet?
The path to understanding repeatedly confronts a mountain, because
'Similarity / and difference only become apparent / with time.'
Peyrou's Possibilities in Shade is a beautiful love poem, an
inspired ode to self-recognition." âMarjorie Perloff
The Enchanted Isles begins with a dream in which Oh, the narrator,
returns to a voyage he made to the GalĂĄpagos - known as enchanted
because of their danger-ous currents, which lured seamen to their
deaths - ten years earlier. It was to be a voyage of enchantment, a
lovers' voyage, an eight-day cruise paid for by a magical win at
roulette, the number eight coming up eight times in a row. But in
the meantime, Ah and Oh have separated, and so the memory dream is
shot through with regret and also with a sometimes nightmarish
vision of the ugly black volcanic islands where Darwin, observing
mutations in finches, first came up with the idea of evolution. In
a multi-themed jazz rondo form, extracts from Darwin's writings,
geo-metry, chance and fate, giant tortoises complaining of human
depredation, iguanas, jellyfish, blades of grass, extinct
volcanoes, scuba diving and tender tourist conversation dance round
and round. Occasionally the music breaks down and stutters: we hear
dissonance as well as secret harmonies. This is a work of great
lyricism, teasing humour and complex originality, a poem of
everything. "A radical experiment in poetics, a world that is both
real and unreal." -Miguel Casado, La Vanguardia, Barcelona "One of
the best books in Spanish of the past 20 years."Â -Francesco
Tarquini, Ispanoamericana, University of Roma La sapienza
Mercedes Cebrian is interested in how the ideas and ideals by which
we live our lives intersect with the minutiae of those lives: food,
decor, travel, taxes, relationships, celebrity-watching, the
quiddity of the everyday. I remember a board-game / from my
child-hood: trees, houses, cars, / tiny people with fixed smiles,
lives mapped-out,/ with consumer choices made for you/ and
decisions taken for you / on the little question-cards she writes
in the poem 'City now or soon', but the day-to-day of the shiny new
Spanish democracy turns out to be not quite so picture-perfect, and
in her surreal, rapid, darkly funny, lyrical poems she proves adept
at putting her finger in society's wounds. Cebrian is one of the
most fascinating and original voices in current Spanish poetry.
Like a glazier reconstructing a mirror broken into a hundred
shards, Eduardo Moga assembles a portrait of his father, thirty
years after his death, from tiny sharp fragments of memory. This is
no idealized patriarch but an ordinary man who has lived almost his
whole life in the grey, grey hardscrabble years of the Franco
dictatorship when it was 'as if everybody's feet smelt'. He is seen
with a forensic clarity through now a child's, now an adult's eyes
and across the gulf that education, relative prosperity and happier
times inevitably create. He is sometimes absurd in his opinions and
little vanities, sometimes off-putting in his personal habits,
angry, lost, pitiable, but often kind and wanting to pass on his
erratic wisdom. Most of all, and this is Moga's great achievement,
he is a real living person. Moga writes with lyrical depth about
fathers who bequeath the best of themselves to their sons and sow
only distance, and about sons who cannot forgive their fathers'
vulgarity and cannot forgive their own estrangement and lack of
sympathy. Jose Angel Cilleruelo, El Balcon de Enfrente In this
splendid book Eduardo Moga dissects not just the story of a family
but the story of Spain. Francisco H. Gonzalez, Devaneos
"âDown from the mountain they forbade us swarm frantic men,
brandishing their manuals of transcendental reason.â The mountain
is of course Mount Olympus, and the frantic men Spainâs all-male
poetry establishment bent on excluding women from all their
activities. âNot to confront them,â continues Erika MartĂnez,
âwould be to bow oneâs head in shame in front of oneâs own
mirror.â Women poets have only been published in numbers in Spain
in the last 25 years and still account for only 15% of the poetry
books published every year. The Premio Nacional de PoesĂa has been
awarded 52 times and been won by a woman 4 times. It isnât at all
uncommon for influential anthologies to be all-male or include at
most one or two women among twenty men. Women are usually absent
from the lists of the most venerable publishers. The founder of
Visor, JesĂșs GarcĂa SĂĄnchez, known affectionately as Chus Visor,
recently declared in El Mundoâs culture supplement:
ââŠwomenâs poetry doesnât bear comparison to menâs. There
wasnât an important woman poet in the whole of the twentieth
century and there isnât one now.â This neglect and disdain
(gradually diminishing in the new generation) and the consequent
delay in the appearance of Spanish women poets in translation was
one of the motives for this anthology, but to bring their musical,
lucid, forthright poems to English readers is its principal
intent." âfrom Terence Dooleyâs Afterword to this volume This
is the first anthology of its kind to appear in the UK, and
features ten poets: Pilar AdĂłn, Martha AsunciĂłn Alonso, Graciela
Baquero, Mercedes CebriĂĄn, MarĂa Eloy-GarcĂa, Berta GarcĂa
Faet, Erika MartĂnez, Elena Medel, Miriam Reyes and Julieta Valero
â one born in the 1960s, six in the 1970s and three in the 1980s.
I bring together in Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark a wide
selection of poems written about the city over the past two
centuries by Spanish poets. The starting date had to be 1800 as I
couldnât find anything written earlier. The poems had to be
recognisably about the city. There are probably many more poems
written in London by Spanish poets, but I wasnât about to enter
into an archaeology of creation or sift through biographies, a task
beyond the scope of this anthology: I wanted poems that mentioned
London, whatever else they were also about. So all these poems have
an explicit connection to the city. Sometimes London is the
protagonist, sometimes the setting, and sometimes it represents an
outside space which the poet interiorises, but it always remains a
real place, an urban environment to accept as it is or to confront.
I didnât select the poems on the basis of form or style. Streets
Where to Walk Is to Embark contains every kind of expression,
tradition, sensibility and voice â the only benchmark for
inclusion was quality. So the anthology, as well as being a
balanced history, is also a display of the breadth of styles of
current Spanish poetry, and of the poetry of the past. The poems
had to have been already published. I wasnât looking for new
work, but for a significant historical record. âEduardo Moga
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Sur(rendering) (Paperback)
Mario Martin Gijon; Translated by Terence Dooley
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R502
R439
Discovery Miles 4 390
Save R63 (13%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Mario MartĂn GijĂłnâs (Sur)rendering is a sequence of short
pas-sionate lyrics describing a love lost and found. This might
sound like nothing new in the history of poetry, but the poet
immerses us in his story by a complex process of linguistic
recreation: recreation in the sense of re-invention and recreation
also as play, or playfulness. Â Â Â Â
 Eduardo Moga explains his method: âThe poetry of Mario
MartĂn GijĂłn is characterised by a morphological promiscuity
which springs from an intense awareness of the susceptibility of
language to experiment. Words become lexical clay in the hands of
the poet, or articulated entities into which other words may be
telescoped. Words break, unscrew, crumble onto the page like sand.
They are like scattered pieces of a mosaic reassembled to form a
new puzzle. This is done by the insertion of brackets around
letters, slashes allowing a choice between letters, dashes severing
or connecting syllables, suffixes or prefixes belonging equally to
the words surrounding them. It multiplies the ways in which a
phrase can be read, multiplies its potential simultaneous
meanings.â So the poet is able to juggle the memory of pleasure
with present suffering, joy and pain in a single verse:
(pre/es/ab)sence. Ambiguity striving for synchronicity, the
language of love becoming as fraught with contradiction as love
itself.
The Year of the Crab tells the story of an endless seaside summer,
or perhaps a series of summers spent in the same place. It is a
musical interplay of emotions and ideas, with recurring motifs and
characters, often very funny, often profound, with a sense of
childhood discovery remembered in maturity, an idyll with the
background voices of fear, illness and death never far away, but
also with strong intimations of love, nostalgia and happiness. It
is a magical poem. âThe Year of the Crab is transparent, of a
transparency that is almost frightening: it speaks with the
visionary ability of a child, but with the composure of an elderly
man (âŠ). It is a beautiful, marvellous tale of love and
terror.â âAda Salas, Nayagua âMariano Peyrouâs writing is
among the most personal and surprising on the current scene.â
âLuis BaguĂ© QuĂlez, Babelia
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Selected Poems (Paperback)
Eduardo Moga; Edited by Luis Ingelmo; Translated by Terence Dooley
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R595
R523
Discovery Miles 5 230
Save R72 (12%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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We have become used to a life of routine and uniformity: at work,
in our relationships with others and with ourselves when we seek to
understand what surrounds and subjugates us. Messages flood in and,
instead of criticising reality, they reinforce the status quo and
encourage us to accept it and maintain it. To counterbalance the
hierarchies and justifications of modern life, there are voices
raised in protest, like Eduardo Moga's, which don't mourn a
presumed lost golden age, or bewail their disillusionment. That
phase was left behind for Moga long ago, and we must presume he
underwent an apprenticeship of disappointment: the discovery that
the gods do not love us, but torment us, and then put all his
efforts into unlearning it all. Moga's poetry does not preach,
however, or burden us with rules or ideas to bring us to an
imaginary better world, here or in the afterlife. The only life is
this, the here and now, the life of the body, the life of the
senses connecting us to the world. To restore our delight in the
present is not a trivial mission and Moga confronts us time and
again with our emotions and sensations, with the intention of
blotting out thereby the monotonous discourse of the
representatives of order. One might think, then, that the poet is
acting like a strategist on a battlefield. Far from the Manichaean
vision of the soldier, who is unable to see beyond dualities, this
poetry is nourished by subtlety, detail and precision. It is not
artillery, but a fine wielding of the scalpel which, with the
delicacy and determination of the silversmith, dissects the tumour
and cyst threatening our life, which is then able to flourish as a
result.
While the land question from the mid-Victorian period to the eve of
the First World War plays a prominent role in Irish historiography,
historians have tended to overlook its importance in
post-independence Ireland and have generally assumed that there was
no land question after 1922. Terence Dooley debunks this myth. In
this first systematic analysis of the land question in independent
Ireland, he contends that agrarian agitation proved to be an
important stimulus to political revolution during the period 1917
to 1923. He assesses the dangers which agitation posed for the
Provisional Government after 1922 and argues that the 1923 Land Act
not only ended agrarian agitation but also made a major
contribution to ending the Civil War. Dooley emphasises the
significance of Irish Land Commission to Irish rural life in an
extensive analysis of the working of the Land Commission after its
reconstitution in 1923. The commission became the most important
(and controversial) government body operating in independent
Ireland. It acted as a facilitator of social engineering,
compulsorily acquiring lands from traditional landlords, large
farmers, graziers and negligent farmers and passing them on to
smallholders, ex-employees of acquired estates, evicted tenants and
their representatives, members of the pre-Truce IRA and the
landless. It migrated over 14,500 farmers onto lands totalling
almost 400,000 acres. The continued hunger for land and the impact
of land acquisition and division on so many people ensured that the
land reform question remained one of the most potent political
issues until the early 1980s.
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