I never made it down to the Stream and Gliding Sun literary festival in Tinahely, Co Wicklow, but the anthology of the same name that has just been published makes for absorbing reading.
Taking its title from Yeats's poem, Stream and Sun at Glendalough, and subtitled A Wicklow Anthology, it's edited by David Wheatley, who has been the county's writer in residence for the past year.
In it you'll find an extraordinary range of poetry and prose, either directly or indirectly linked to Wicklow - or, as the editor says of the contributors, "if not all Wicklowmen and women by birth, for the purposes of the present volume they are all Wicklowmen and women in the eyes of God." Thus, you encounter the famous and the little-known, Wicklow people by birth or inclination - Gerald of Wales rubbing shoulders with Samuel Beckett, Hugh Maxton, Sir Walter Scott, Donald Davie, Thomas Kinsella, William Blake, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Neil Jordan, Liz McManus, Sebastian Barry, Anne Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, Colum Kenny, Diarmaid O Muirithe and Seamus Heaney.
Handsomely published by Wicklow County Council at a mere £5, it's a splendidly serendipitous volume, and so is its companion, I Am the Crocus, which is selling for £3. This is a selection of poems by schoolchildren from Wicklow, and again it's edited by David Wheatley, who says he came across "hundreds and hundreds of children writing exuberant, witty and marvellous poetry".
He's right, and I wish I had the space here to quote lots of their poems, including Eva Coller's striking images of anger and the vivid accounts by Stephanie Connolly and Niamh Dolan of disastrous meals cooked by their dads. But I'll content myself with the stark simplicity of the three quatrains contained in 16 to Go by Alan Dutton:
To see 16 people go
Is not very nice you know.
To see them go so young
Just as they were having fun.
Some best friends side by side
They all just simply died.
To see the bullets just fly and fly
It's silly to see young children die.
Just as they were having fun,
A man bursts in with a gun.
Bang, bang, bye, bye.
Don't let their parents cry.
Unlike President McAleese, whose speech at the Irish Times/Harvard colloquium was provocative in the best sense of the word, Bertie Ahern is not generally known as a silver-tongued orator, but he was both incisive and very droll at the launch of James Downey's elegant and engrossing biography of Brian Lenihan.
The launch was in the Shelbourne, but there were so many politicians from all parties in attendance that I kept having to remind myself I wasn't in the Dail bar.
Una Agnew's The Mystical Imagination of Patrick Kavanagh is published this week by the religious publishing house, The Columba Press, though a less lofty Kavanagh is portrayed in the first paragraph of the press release announcing the book.
"He did little," it contends, "to inspire confidence in his general public, either in his native Inniskeen or in the Dublin circles he frequented. People moved away from him in pubs, buses and trains. He frightened young girls with his loud language when they passed him in the street."
And yet, it continues, "Kavanagh's work stands as a monument to a nobility and gentleness of soul that surprises even as it inspires. Above all, it challenges us not to be deceived by appearance - that beneath the coat of a beggar there may lurk a hidden mystic."
And that's the thrust of Ms Agnew's study. Mindful of Kavanagh's own view that his poetry is best read "without comment from the scholar", it nonetheless uses as a framework "the ancient mystical stages which were outlined by Evelyn Underhill: awakening, purification, illumination and transformation".
I haven't yet read Ms Agnew's book, but I wonder what Kavanagh himself would have made of such soul-searching.
The latest edition of Index on Censorship (£8.99 in UK) has an extensive Irish section, compiled in the wake of the atrocities at Ballymoney and Omagh - such massacres being, of course, the most extreme and barbaric form of censorship.
There are interesting contributions from Robert Fisk, Luke Gibbons and Richard Kearney, and an arresting translation of Aodhgan O'Rathaille's Gile na Gile by Seamus Heaney, which he has entitled The Glamoured.
In an accompanying prose piece, the Nobel laureate writes that O'Rathaille "is one of the last great voices of the native Irish tradition, Dantesque in his anger and hauteur, a voice crying in the more or less literal wilderness of the Gaelic outback, at once the master of outrage and the witness of desolation".