Loose Leaves: Can we boast? Poetry Review, the magazine of the Poetry Society in Britain, is now edited by Fiona Sampson, a regular reviewer on these pages, and the first issue of the quarterly under her editorship is out now. Sampson is the first woman editor of the UK's oldest poetry journal since Muriel Spark in 1947-9.
A nice feature of the review is its literary letter from foreign parts, and the one in this issue, from Iowa, is by Christopher Merrill, who directs the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa. Writing about a memorial tribute to Frank Conroy, director of the Iowa Writers Workshop and author of a memoir, Stop-time, it set Merrill thinking of how many other deaths there had been lately.
"This year we mourned the passing of Robert Creeley, Mona Van Duyn, Thom Gunn, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice and Czeslaw Milosz; bold spirits whose works decisively shaped our literary landscape," Merrill writes. A remarkable generation of poets is, he adds, dying off. The widespread grief occasioned by Creeley's death suggested the centrality of his achievement. "I recognise that we are all in Creeley's car - 'drive, he sd, for/ christ's sake,look/ out where yr going' - lines that resonate all the more powerfully now that American foreign policy increasingly resembles a drunken driver," Merrill writes, adding that Gunn and Milosz mapped where we are going with a kind of clarity that brings to mind the witness of Alexis de Tocqueville, still the most reliable guide to the American experiment. One had a strong sense, reading Merrill's letter, of just how needed this kind of witness to America is in these dark days.
Sampson's opening issue also has poetry by John Burnside, John F Deane, Sean O'Brien, CK Williams and Matthew Sweeney, among others .
Poetry Review, Vol 95, No 2, Summer 2005, £7.95
No-go Americanos
We'd got into our element with the coffee shops in the bookshops on Dublin's Dawson Street. It had begun to feel positively Manhattanish, drinking Americanos in a bookish environment, often meeting like-minded souls and members of the literary sorority in the process. Now the coffee niches in both Hodges Figgis and Waterstones are closed, the latter a victim of the demise of Bewley's coffee shops generally (though word is that this slot will be filled eventually by another franchise). Meanwhile, the gallery cafe in Eason Hanna's is still there, thank goodness.
'Eddie's Own Aquarius' dawns
Eddie Linden, founder and editor of poetry magazine Aquarius, who has been publishing the magazine for 40 years, is to get a unique 70th birthday present: a special book-type edition of the magazine, for which massive fundraising is currently underway. A measure of Linden's place in the arts/ literary constellation can be gauged by the list of contributors: Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern, Paul Durcan, John Montague, Elaine Feinstein, Seamus Heaney, James Liddy, Derek Mahon, Tom Paulin, John Behan, Alasdair Gray, Alice Maher and Constance Short are just a few of those participating.
Born in Co Tyrone, Linden was brought up in Scotland and now lives in London, with spells in Dundalk. The publication, called Eddie's Own Aquarius, will be published next spring and has the support of the Poetry Society in London and Poetry Ireland.
Details: constanceshort@eircom.net
Fun festival line-up
GP Taylor, Cathy Hopkins, Philip Ardagh, Alan Durant, Niamh Sharkey and Joan Lingard are in the line-up for the forthcoming Children's Book Festival, now in its ninth year, which will run from October 5th to 31st. Presented by Children's Books Ireland, in association with the Youth Libraries Group, it will as usual involve events all around the country, with the aim of presenting reading as a fun activity. The event also publishes Book Fest, a 64-page recommended reading guide to new books for toddlers up to teenagers.
festival@childrensbooksireland.com; www.childrensbooksireland.com
A weekend in Kiely country
The main thing about the Fourth Benedict Kiely (right) Literary Weekend (from the 16 to the 18th of this month) is how unusual and positive it is to have a summer school about an Irish writer while he's still alive. Poet Gerald Dawe is among the speakers and will speak on Kiely's novel, Proxopera. Widening the net, there will also be a talk on Brian Friel: Nationalist or Faith Healer? by Dr Patrick Burke. Thomas O'Grady, of the University of Massachusetts, will give the keynote address on The Presence of the Past, the Pastness of the Present; Place and Time in Benedict Kiely's Short Stories. The bus tour of Kiely country with his old friend, Stephen McKenna, is another highlight.
www.omagh.gov.uk