The answer to Yeats’s question is ‘nothing’ emanating from the Clutag Press. After a period of reasonable success in mailing into the Republic of Ireland in the post-Brexit disaster era, we have started to have a high proportion of ‘sales’ bounce back inexplicably from Irish Customs. This despite our providing the correct Customs Form correctly completed, or as correctly as served us well until recently. Other EU countries in which we have customers (France, Germany, Denmark) process our packages, on the same information, without issue. But recently the Republichas seemed to adopt another agenda. We have always hugely valued our Irish customers in the Republic (and charged them the same for P&P as customers on the island of Britain) and…
Author: andrew
Archipelago at the Museum of Literature, Ireland
Join us for a celebration of writing about place and nature, and the launch of the fifteenth issue of the literary magazine, Archipelago Tues 7th May, 6.30pm Click here to book for Late HeaneyNicholas Allen, Late Heaney: Poetry and Place after the Nobel Weds 8th May, 10am until 6pm Click here to book for ArchipelagoThe very best of prose, poetry, and song about place and nature of ‘the unnameablearchipelago’, that constellation of islands off the north-west coast of Europe 6.30pm Launch Reception for Archipelago, the 15th issue Andrew McNeillie, The Good Ship PROGRAMME Old Physics Theatre, Museum of Literature Ireland Tuesday 7th May 18:30 Welcome Reception 19:00 Nicholas Allen, Late Heaney: Poetry and Place after the Nobel Wednesday 8th May…
Archipelago reaches a remote corner of the archipelago
Namely, 1 London Bridge Street, LONDON SE1 9GF, as evidenced here: While this is not unprecedented, it is worth recording, like the passage of a comet through the night sky.
Omnium-gatherum
Update: Another superb new review of Lilliput Press’s Archipelago: A Reader (Edited by Nicholas Allen and Fiona Stafford) by Dan MacCarthy was published on 29th January 2022 in the Irish Examiner. Click here to read the review. Further press coverage in the Irish Times from Saturday, December 4th 2021 (click on the image or click here for a more legible version) Omnium-gatherum Here to remind you of Lilliput Press’s Archipelago: A Reader, edited by Nicholas Allen and Fiona Stafford, and launched in Convocation House, Divinity School, The Bodleian Library, Oxford, on 10 November, and by Zoom from the Dublin Literary Festival, the next day. Surely, the ideal Christmas present for all those of an archipelagic persuasion. Here’s what M.…
Until Depth Do Us Part
The Harbour Light . . . . . . . . . . . . lowered and lifted – a canary in a mine-shaft fluttering guttering but unquenched. Lead kindly as she wrangles and haggles for passage through wheeling collisions of light flashed at death’s threshold, hell’s mouth, heaven’s gaping gate, the narrow strait and close scrape, Davy’s Locker and lamp together, rocky seamark and landmark vying on a soul’s darkest before the dawn, gull and gale crying until depth do us part – glass-eyed cod, haddock, monk, on ice – the crew, lids propped, dying to turn in, to drown in sleep until they wake restless to put out again as much for the sake of it as for…
After Tim Robinson’s Time in Space
i.m. Máiréad Andrew McNeillie and Tim Robinson at Roundstone, March 2001 After the obituaries, the éloges and sail-shaped remembrances. After the crowds have left on the boat and the pollution of their footfall dies away with the evening. After autumn’s equinox begins the purer dream of winter – that’s when to settle in to work and when I’ve thought of you most often, in the capital of monochrome, at Fearann an Choirce, in your storm-walled house with its empty window-frame, overlooking the west. And after all now, I find myself thinking of you all the time – bald, and silent as a Buddha as you’ve become, staring from a photo on my wall, from the night we first met, as…
Number 13
Since Archipelago 12 sailed into the world, we’ve all been stood down, though the wheelhouse is still spinning in its wake and beside itself. I gave the Tannahill Lecture at Glasgow University in February: ‘Theatres in the Round’, about islands, from Inis Mór to Whalsay, and their lives, in print, in image, and in themselves. The lecture was subsequently edited into five parts and published in the culture pages of the Scottish daily the National – a fine institution, very much of the times, proud to be dismissed by the quisling Michael Gove as ‘The worst newspaper in the world.’ Meanwhile Brexit glooms over Scotland the latest cauchemar out of England. Send it home to think again: Enlightened Scotland must…
Night-Snow
Night-Snow wee song for Sydney Graham The real poem never ends. The blizzard beneath its last footprint is where we search in its memory, the blizzard that is also night as fresh on your face as snow. Night-snow the ultimate a body must weather, body I say, but I mean soul out on the manhole sea where the littoral-minded sail beyond Cape Metaphor to be. And Sydney Coastguard keeps his watch ticking on course for Greenock, with Alfred Wallis at the wheel aboard the good wreck Alba. For who but a blind one can’t see Scotland from Cornwall? – every small hour of the year with the heart in the right direction and a glass to his eye. In…
Richard Murphy
Richard Murphy was not just a friend of Archipelago and of the Clutag Press. Through his first collection of poems Sailing to an Island (1963), he was a key figure in the history of the entire venture, a founding father in what we might call the archipelagic turn, taken so notably also by Norman Ackroyd and by Tim and Mairead Robinson. Andrew McNeillie’s An Aran Keening (2001), given him by Bernard and Heather O’Donoghue, was he wrote in June 2016 ‘the last prose work I have read from cover to cover with joy all the way’ and on its author’s birthday 12 August that year ‘What a good decision you made at the age of 22, it seems to me,…
The Last Voyage
‘Winter Tide: The Last Voyage’ Andrew McNeillie © 2017 If you’ve ever wondered what all this is about, track down Jos Smith’s essay ‘Fugitive Allegiances. The Good Ship Archipelago and the Atlantic Edge’ in Coastal Works (OUP, 2017) edited by Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom, and Jos Smith himself. It gives the richest and most inspired and inspiring account of the project and its origins you could wish for. Rarely would that same good ship put in at Cill Rónáin, Inis Mór, in August, at the height of the tourist season. But it did this time. And it rained Biblically for three and a half days out of five, with one truly fair day in between, as just deserts for such…