Book Binding Course ‘Printing Presses and Private Collectors’ (advanced) – 29, 30 August 2020

James Joyce, though better known as a novelist, was also an accomplished poet. Chamber Music, his debut collection, fused the styles of the Celtic Revival with his own brand of playful irony and has inspired composers as diverse as Samuel Barber, Luciano Berio and Syd Barrett. His second collection, Pomes Penyeach, written between 1904 and 1924 sounds intimately autobiographical notes of passion and betrayal that resonate through the rest of his work. Other poems include the well-known ‘Ecce Puer’, written for his newborn grandson, and his fierce satires, ‘The Holy Office’ and ‘Gas from a Burner’.

Joyce’s only play, Exiles, was written in 1914-15. Influenced by Ibsen, whom Joyce greatly admired, it tells the story of writer Richard Rowan, and his partner Bertha, who must live in defiance of social convention in Dublin or return to exile in Rome. At the same time, it is a richly nuanced drama involving two love triangles and exploring Joycean themes of human freedom and dignity, sexual jealousy and guilt, love and friendship. Exiles is also a portrait of the artist, drawing on Joyce’s own complicated relationships – with Nora Barnacle, and with Ireland itself, which he was never to visit again – at a time when he was just embarking on his greatest novel, Ulysses.

Now available in a unique hand bound version.

Literary giants Yeats and Heaney are surrounded by a host of other poets – Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Derek Mahon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Eavan Bolan, Ciaran Carson and Paul Muldoon, to name but a few – in this anthology of the best of Irish poetry. With its roots in the devotional verse of the early Christian church and the long lyric poems of the Irish bards, Irish poetry has a rich and robust tradition both of engagement and self-reflection. It has grappled long with politics, providing the most eloquent response to Ireland’s turbulent history; it has encompassed religion, so much a part of Ireland’s cultural heritage; it has soaked itself in the Irish landscape and Celtic myth and has given an original slant to everyday experience and affairs of the heart. Thematically organized and spanning many centuries, this selection also features a section on Gaelic poetry in translation.

Now available in a unique hand bound version.

Virtually unknown in her lifetime, the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830–86) is now recognised as a major literary achievement. Unique in style, obsessive in content, these short and vivid lyrics together form what is perhaps the greatest body of religious verse in modern times.

Now available in a unique hand bound version.