Plays & Poetry

"Speaking is part of a whole: an expression of inner life. " Cicely Berry has based her work on the conviction that while all is present in nature our natural instincts have been crippled from birth by many processes--by the conditioning, in fact, of a warped society.

WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2014 *PBS Recommendation 2014* 'When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could not stop me...' In Black Country, Liz Berry takes flight: to Wrens Nest, Gosty Hill, Tipton-on-Cut;

In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheal mac Liammoir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate became a site of avant-garde nationalism in the Ireland's tumultuous first post-independence decades.

Memory is the leitmotif of the collection, sparked by the smell of orange peel with that Kavanagh-like ending of ‘sixty Christmases of age’, by the sight of ‘frozen clothes/still hanging on the garden line’, in the ‘thud on the kitchen window’ or Joe Malone’s bohemian pub of the 70s.

Like traditional, honeyed Irish soda bread or dark chocolate truffles suffused with plenty of good Irish whiskey, this charismatic book of poetry you hold in your hands, by Kieran Beville, an esteemed Irish poet, and the reading of the poems inside, is a satisfyingly nourishing, sensual experience to savour, over and over again. Its attention to craft, passion for language, and with a profound understanding of the depths of the roots of memory, is an astounding work of poetry.

Poetyr - originally published in 2020. Soul Songs…places the poet and the reader very much in the moment at this particular point in history. But Beville understands that the present, and therefore any potential future, is shaped by what went on before, and for this reason memory plays a major part in how the poet addresses the current state of affairs, both private and public.

Coming in autumn 2023, the long-awaited latest book in the much loved Sunday Miscellany series from RTÉ Radio 1.