Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Reflection”
We were saddened to hear of the death of the poet Niall McDevitt in September. Known to many of the Society’s followers as a bright presence and the poet in residence at the Hammersmith, Irish Cultural Centre. He was a multi-talented man, self-described as “poet-pyschogeographer, art-activist”. Any who took his animated, expansive and richly enjoyable literary walks will recall a …
After over a year of our retreating to private spaces Emma Devlin reflects on distance and technology, and how her room in a shared house in Belfast reflects and records her presence. Journey Around My Room By EMMA DEVLIN I looked up my flat on Google maps. The two squares of scrappy land just outside the front door used to …
On 12 August 1920, hard upon assuming his duties as Lord Mayor of Cork and Commandant of the First Cork Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, Terence MacSwiney was arrested in Cork City Hall and summarily sentenced by a military court to two years in Brixton Prison for crimes including his possession of ‘seditious articles and documents’ and of a cypher …
By ANTON THOMPSON-MCCORMICK There was no point trying to be calm the night I first crossed paths with Lyra McKee. It was February 2019, and here we were in a former Pentecostal Church in central London to celebrate Anna Burns becoming Northern Ireland’s first winner of the Man Booker Prize, for Milkman. It was Burns’ first big post-Booker event and …
By ANDREW MCGUINNESS Samuel Beckett raps hard at my house. I hear him, but can’t see through the glassy eyes of the door. A package juts half-in, half-out of the mouth of it, poking fun through the letterbox like a rascally, white-furred tongue. My wife slips a fresh pair of surgical gloves on, sprays the surface with disinfectant, wipes it …
By DOROTHY ALLEN The last time I was in isolation, I had the whooping cough. I must have been aged eight or nine, in Sister Consilio’s class and laid up for so long in April, May, June, I was worried I wouldn’t be “promoted” come July. The first weeks are a blur of coughing, whooping, tossing and turning in a …
