Tracing the memories of home through both people and place, McGahern details family life and the beginnings of a writing career that would take him far from home, and then back again. Haunting and illuminating, All Will Be Well is an unforgettable portrait of Ireland and one of its most beloved writers.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    New Collected Poems now brings the record of her achievement up to date, adding material from her subsequent volumes and filling out key poems from the early years. Following the chronology of publication, the reader experiences the exhilarating sense of development, now incremental, now momentous. Boland’s work traces a measured process of emancipation from conventions and stereotypes, writing now in a space she has cleared not by violent rejection, but by dialogue, critical engagement, and patient experimentation with form, theme, and language.

    A year later, while en route to India, their troop ship is recalled and they soon find themselves in the European slaughterhouse that was World War I. As stretcher bearers, the two men witness all too closely the horrors of the battlefield and the trenches, the savagery, and the unconscionable waste of human life on fields made liquid by “the blood and guts of boy soldiers” at the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele. Meanwhile, back home in Ireland, Con’s sister and Matthias’s lover, Kitty Hatchel, yearns for their safe return and reminds them of their carefree childhood on the banks of the local canal, as well as their hopes for the future.Brilliantly and movingly narrated by a chorus of voices from the community — Matt, Con, Kitty, and others — The Canal Bridge tells the story of how the young men take Ballyrannel to war with them, and how the war comes back home when hostilities end in Europe. The Ireland the friends left in 1913 no longer exists, for the political landscape has been transformed by the Rising against the British in 1916. It is now a land riven with sectarian tensions and bloodshed from which there is no escape.

    

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    Throw in the vowels is a new retrospective from Rita Ann Higgins: provocative and heart-warming poems of high jinx, jittery grief and telling social comment by a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of the Irish dispossessed.

    Challenging received notions, Tony Crowley presents a complex, fascinating, and often surprising history which has suffered greatly in the past from over-simplification. Beginning with Henry VIII's Act for English Order, Habit, and Language (1537) and ending with the Republic of Ireland's Official Languages Act (2003) and the introduction of language rights under the legislation proposed by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (2004), this clear and accessible narrative follows the continuities and discontinuities of Irish history over the past five hundred years.The major issues that have both united and divided Ireland are considered with regard to language, including ethnicity, cultural identity, religion, sovereignty, propriety, purity, memory, and authenticity. But rather than simply presenting the accepted wisdom on many of the language debates, this book re-visits the material and considers previously little-known evidence in order to offer new insights and to contest earlier accounts. The materials range from colonial state papers to the writings of Irish revolutionaries, from the work of Irish priest historians to contemporary loyalist politicians, from Gaelic dictionaries to Ulster-Scots poetry.Wars of Words offers a reading of the crucial role language has played in Ireland's political history. It concludes by arguing that the Belfast Agreement's recognition that languages are 'part of the cultural wealth of the island of Ireland', will be central to the social development of the Republic and Northern Ireland. The final chapter analyses the way in which contemporary poets have used Gaelic, Hiberno-English, Ulster-English, and Ulster-Scots, as vehicles for the various voices that demand to be heard in the new societies on both sides of the border.