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“Wasp on the Prayer Flag” a Collection of Haiku Poetry by Maeve O’Sullivan
Back from its extended summer break, Trasna is please to present the latest publication from poet Maeve O’Sullivan, Wasp on the Prayer Flag. This is Maeve’s fifth collection with Alba Publishing. It chronicles the years from 2018-2021 in haiku and senryu. Rooted in Ireland and its varied landscapes, with some ‘postcards’ from the UK and Europe, this collection celebrates the inspiration and consolation of nature and the durability of human connections. In this volume, O’Sullivan has been praised for her keen eye, lightness of touch, and depth of feeling. While the subject of O’Sullivan’s previous volume, Elsewhere, centered on an extensive trip to 13 countries, much of her current volume explores her native Ireland.…
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Trasna writers in The Lowell Review 2021
The Lowell Review Several writers featured in Trasna (2020) have been included in a new annual publication, The Lowell Review. Copies of The Lowell Review are available for purchase, or online through Richardhowe.com. Below are selections from those Trasna pieces included in the 2021 edition with selections from 2020. We look forward to the 2022 volume with pieces from this year. The belated discovery of a role-model: Nessa O’Mahony on Eavan Boland “… Perhaps I’m mis-remembering. The next reading of hers I do recall was a much smaller affair in the back-garden of a bookshop in the leafy Dublin suburb of Rathgar. Eavan was reading the poem, ‘The Black Lace Fan My Mother…
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‘A Morning Walk’ from “Intimate City: Dublin Essays” by Peter Sirr
Featured in today’s Irish Times is a collection of essays by prize-winning poet, Peter Sirr: “Intimate City: Dublin Essays.” This week, Trasna is pleased to present ‘A morning walk,’ one of the essays from this brilliant collection. Sirr’s essays explore Dublin’s past and present; travel its narrow lanes; meditate on its earliest map; and contemplate the impact a place can have on those who live there. In one of his essays ‘Shirts for Books,’ Sirr discusses the loss of a landmark bookshop: “The death of a bookshop always hits hard. There are never that many of them to begin with and they are rarely replaced, so that one more opportunity…
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Felicity Hayes-McCoy and “The Year of Lost and Found”
Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s latest novel, “The Year of Lost and Found,” again takes place on Ireland’s fictional Finfarran peninsula. It is a novel about ordinary people with extraordinary secrets. Set in 2018, it takes place in the lead-up to the year of Ireland’s Civil War commemorations, and explores shared, hidden, and revealed family memories. Warmth and humour are central to Felicity Hayes-McCoy’s storytelling, which critics have compared to Maeve Binchy’s, and, coincidentally, the book’s sensitive portrayal of physical and emotional isolation from family will resonate with readers after a year of lockdown. In discussing her latest novel, Hayes-McCoy says “What’s concealed and revealed in Irish life has always fascinated me, particularly…
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Linda Ibbotson, “Homage to Kinsale” and Other Writings
As we reach mid-June with the fervor to celebrate the season and enjoy beloved places, Trasna welcomes Linda Ibbotson and her tribute to the beauty of the coastal town Kinsale, to the legacy of Irish culture, and her creative collaboration with Russian pianist and composer Arsentiy Kharitonov. A gifted poet and lyricist, whose artwork and photographs have won acclaim, Ibbotson shares her spirit of renewal in both the present and the past with readers. Notes From an Empty Room Collaboration with Arsentiy Kharitonov As a classical piano lover, I was delighted when Russian pianist and composer Arsentiy Kharitonov emailed a composition to me and invited me (if it inspired me)…
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New Poems from Linda Whittenberg
Linda Whittenberg first connected with Ireland through her beloved Irish grandfather, Will Shannon, with whom she spent her childhood in the Illinois farmland where she was born. As a Unitarian-Universalist minister in the United States, she served congregations in the West before launching her voice as a poet. During Writers’ Week in Listowel, County Kerry, in 2014, she launched her book Somewhere in Ireland (Black Swan Editions, 2014), which narrates in poetry her narrative of her experiences in the land of her Shannon ancestors. Whittenberg finds herself drawn to this “land of her ancestors” and returns often, almost annually. In the recent poems she shares with Trasna, Linda Whittenberg experiences…
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Theresa Jones reads “Bridget or Pat” and other work
This week Trasna is pleased to present the work of Theresa Jones, whose writing frequently focuses on place, location and dislocation. We open with her reading of her poem, “Bridget or Pat”, which treats of the challenges of her mother’s identity as an immigrant to the UK, and raises the question of who has the power to name. We follow with her essay on the “Nanny Water Cottage”, a distinctive coastal landmark in Co. Meath. The essay expands on the social and cultural development of this small east coast community, influenced by the development of rail travel in the late 1800s, and also the unusual sport of horse-racing on the strand…
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“Listening in: Radio Dramas in a Virtual Realm” by Margaret O’Brien
Many of us are discovering that the most amazing things can be achieved when people pool their talents and resources, even during a pandemic. Maybe especially during a pandemic. And this week’s post on Trasna, the ‘Radio Drama in a Virtual Realm’ project, is the result of just such a pooling of talent and a model of what can be achieved when many people put their generous shoulders to the wheel. On Monday, 29th, Tuesday 30th and Wednesday 31st March, 2021, as the culmination of a major creative collaboration, The Tudor Artisan Hub arts collective broadcast three original short radio plays, one each night. There is an intimacy to listening that is particular…
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‘Nora’, an excerpt, as read by its author Nuala O’Connor
This week on Trasna we are very pleased to present writer, Nuala O’Connor, reading an excerpt from her most recent novel, NORA. The eponymous Nora was, of course, Nora Barnacle, lover, wife and soulmate to writer James Joyce. In her novel O’Connor gives us Nora’s distinctive character, voice and original world view as the couple scrape a living in various parts of Europe. In sensuous and compelling prose O’Connor draws Nora as a staunchly nonliterary but original personality with her own distinctive voice. We see how Nora and Joyce dealt with his rising fame, his declining health, their family struggles. Their private tensions are set against the background of a Europe convulsed…
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‘Hope against Hope’ a Historical Novel by Sheena Wilkinson
Trasna is pleased to present a work of historical fiction, ‘Hope against Hope’ by Sheena Wilkinson. This is the third outstanding work of historical fiction by the multi-award-winning Sheena Wilkinson. It follows the fantastically successful ‘Star by Star’, which won the Children’s Books Ireland Honour Award for Fiction in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards. Star was selected as a “future classic” by BookTrust and has so far sold around 25,000 copies – Little Island’s bestselling book ever! Hope against Hope is set in 1921. Ireland has been at war for two years. Communities are torn apart by bitter hatred – and now a hard border splits the island. In Belfast,…
