Eugene O'Brien

In the hours following Christ's quiet escape from the grip of death, He began to fulfill His breathtaking promise to dwell within us and walk among us. He chose the road to Emmaus as a fitting venue to showcase the subtle power by which He intended to move His own from venality to virtue, from deceit to forthrightness, and from timidity to boldness. The men that He engaged on the road had felt the pain of broken relationship. The One in whom they had placed their trust failed to live up to His commitment. He had, after all, orphaned them-or had He? Who was this Stranger who suddenly appeared, reminding them of the very truths meant to sustain them? It was only after patient communion that they recognized Him as the One whom they thought had forsaken them. Just as He had emerged from the wreckage of His former physical accommodation, so He appears amid the broken pieces of troubled relationships. The New Testament proclaims that Christ is before all things. One might understand this assertion to imply that in much the same way a conductor assumes himself before an orchestra, Christ directs the timing, movement, rhythm and intensity of all the lives that would have it so. If a broken or neglected relationship is to be restored, it will be done so on the Emmaus Road. The elusive voice will speak from within one circumstance to the next. One might count it silly fancy or he might take it for what it is: the confident direction of a Divine Conductor. One will know when he has chosen the latter, for his heart will indeed burn within him.

The Missing Charms

Scobie Donoghue was once the king of the weekend. His twenties were spent working hard and playing harder. A lovable rogue, the lads wanted to be him and the girls wanted to be with him. But now, about to turn forty and returning to his small midlands hometown, Scobie is back in his childhood bed, single, burnt out and depressed. The life he thought he had left behind has moved on – but has he? Going Back, Eugene O'Brien's heartwarming debut novel, continues the story of hit TV series Pure Mule, capturing the whole world in one Irish town: the highs and the lows, from addiction and mental-health issues to love and redemption. It will take some time and a lot of soul-searching, but maybe Scobie Donoghue is finally ready to grow up. 'I was delighted to get reacquainted with Scobie Donoghue. This is a timely book, engaging and entertaining. It lifts the lid on and exposes the underbelly of the disenfranchised in a community that has been pulled apart since the heady days of the Celtic Tiger.' Liz Nugent

Going Back

Seamus Heaney’s unexpected death in August 2013 brought to completion his body of work, and scholars are only now coming to understand the full scale and importance of this extraordinary career. The Nobel Prize–winning poet, translator, and playwright from the North of Ireland is considered the most important Irish poet after Yeats and, at the time of his death, arguably the most famous living poet. For this reason, much of the scholarship to date on Heaney has understandably focused on his poetry. O’Brien’s new work, however, focuses on Heaney’s essays, book chapters, and lectures as it seeks to understand how Heaney explored the poet’s role in the world. By examining Heaney’s prose, O’Brien teases out a clearer understanding of Heaney’s sense of the function of poetry as an act of public intellectual and ethical inquiry. In doing so, O’Brien reads Heaney as an aesthetic thinker in the European tradition, considering him alongside Heidegger, Derrida, Lacan, and Adorno. Studying Heaney within this theoretical and philosophical tradition sheds new and useful light on one of the greatest creative minds of the twentieth century.

A Study of the Prose

Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker

TIPPETTS-ABBETT-MCCARTHY-STRATTON NEW YORK.

This report provides information and analysis on the physical condition of the dam as of the report date. Information and analysis are based on visual inspection of the dam by the performing organization. Pleasure Lake Dam was judged to be unsafe-non-emergency due to a seriously inadequate spillway. (Author).

National Dam Safety Program. Pleasure Lake Dam (Inventory No.-345), Delaware River Basin, Sullivan County, New York. Phase 1 Safety Program

A study of Seamus Heaney's poetry, prose, and translations by the Head of the English Department at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.

Creating Irelands of the Mind

Seamus Heaney

Deirdre Flynn

This is the first book on Irish literature to focus on the theme of loss, and how it is represented in Irish writing. It focuses on how literature is ideally suited to expressions and understanding of the nature of loss, given its ability to access and express emotions, sensations, feelings, and the visceral and haptic areas of experience. Dealing with feelings and with sensations, poems, novels and drama can allow for cathartic expressions of these emotions, as well as for a fuller understanding of what is involved in loss across all situations. The main notion of loss being dealt with is that of death, but feelings of loss in the wake of immigration and of the loss of certainties that defined notions of identity are also analysed. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers in Irish Studies, loss, memory, trauma, death, and cultural studies.

Representations of Loss in Irish Literature

This collection of essays reconsiders aspects of Irish studies through the medium of literary and cultural theory. The author looks at the negotiations between texts and their contexts and then analyses how the writer both reflects and transforms aspects of his or her cultural milieu. The essays examine literary texts by W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce and Sean Ó'Faoláin; media texts such as Father Ted, American Beauty and a series of Guinness advertisements; as well as cultural and political contexts such as globalisation, religion, the Provisional IRA and media treatment of murders in Ireland. The author also looks at aspects of the postcolonial and feminist paradigms and makes use of a theoretical matrix based on the work of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.

Negotiating Texts and Contexts in Contemporary Irish Studies

"Kicking Bishop Brennan Up the Arse"

"An original and innovative study of Seamus Heaney's poetry and prose, an overdue and welcome addition. . . . the first piece of groundbreaking scholarship that I have read on the subject in years. [It] should convince many that Heaney has been working toward an imaginative expression of Irishness that rivals that of James Joyce."--Michael R. Molino, Southern Illinois University "Exceptional. . . . With a mixture of insightful literary theory and first-rate scholarship, O'Brien breaks new ground. . . . [This] is one of the best books I've read in a long time and deserves to be on the shelf of anyone who values Heaney, Irish literature, or contemporary poetry."--Shawn O'Hare, Carson-Newman College Eugene O'Brien's critical study examines the attitude toward place and home in the works of Seamus Heaney. He looks at the political role of Heaney's writing and argues that his complex engagement with these issues creates a pluralist and emancipatory sense of Irish identity predicated on the future rather than mired in the past. O'Brien's is the first book to trace an isolated theme in Heaney's work, in this case its creation of a politics of place, language, and identity. Unlike chronological studies of Heaney's poetry, O'Brien explores important elements in his entire oeuvre, from his poetry and prose to translations, such as the recent best-selling edition of Beowulf, that relate to the issue of writing and identity--strident nationalism, tribal identification, political ideology, and postcolonial poetics in particular. The first sustained engagement between literary theory and the work of Heaney, the book connects the ethical projects of Heaney and Derrida in terms of their views on the relationship between self and other, and between the present and the past. O'Brien's close reading of Heaney's poems results in a wealth of original arguments; for example, his examination of the Irish poet's most famous book, North, views it as opening a dialogue with other traditions. Another unique emphasis is on the Viking influence on his work. Finally, O'Brien examines the relationship between Heaney's texts and the violence in Northern Ireland that has been the environment of much of his writing. The most contemporary study of Heaney's writings to date--it extends to Electric Light and The Midnight Verdict--this book weaves critical theory and criticism, breaking with previous scholarship to present a reading of Heaney that extends far beyond moments of inspiration and symbolism to reach the very notion of identity and the individual's relationship to the past and present. Eugene O'Brien is professor of English at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.

Seamus Heaney and the Place of Writing

Richard Dormer

Gerald Murphy

Mark Doherty

Malachy McKenna

Christian O'Reilly

Containing six award-winning plays by contemporary Irish writers, this is an exciting collection of the best writing to come out of Ireland in the last six years. The volume is edited with an introduction by John Fairleigh, editor of earlier collection, Far From the Land, also published by Methuen Drama. The six plays in the volume are: Gerald Murphy: Take Me Away (2004) Gerald Murphy is a Dublin based writer and actor. His first play, 'The Welcome', was staged by Druid Theatre Company in 2001. His first radio play, 'Stranger in the Night' won a PJ O'Connor Award and was broadcast by RTÉ in 2001. Mark Doherty: Trad (2004) Mark Doherty is a Dublin-based writer who previously worked as a stand-up comic. Eugene O'Brien: Eden (2001) Eugene O'Brien is a Dublin-based writer and actor. 'Eden' won the 2001 Irish Times Theatre Award for Best New Play and was subsequently staged at the Arts Theatre, on London's West End. Malachy McKenna: Tillsonburg (2000) Malachy McKenna was trained at Focus Stanislavski Studio. He has worked extensively as an actor, and has written for film and theatre. Christian O'Reilly: The Good Father (2002) Christian O'Reilly is a Galway-based writer. Two of his short films, 'The Birthday' and 'The Kiss of Life', have been produced and he has several feature-length screenplays in development. He also writes for television. Richard Dormer: Hurricane (2002) Richard Dormer is an actor based in Belfast.

The Tiger in Winter: Six Contemporary Irish Plays

The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances brings together sixteen of the most prominent scholars who have written on Seamus Heaney to examine the Nobel Prize winner’s later poetry from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to Heaney’s early and middle poems—the Bog Poems in particular—this book focuses on the poetry collected in Heaney's Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006), and Human Chain (2010) as a thematically connected set of writings. The starting point of the essays in this collection is that these later poems can be grouped in terms of style, theme, approach, and intertextuality. They develop themes that were apparent in Heaney’s earlier work, but they also break with these themes and address issues that are radically different from those of the earlier collections. The essays are divided into five sections, focusing on ideas of death, the later style, translation and transnational poetics, luminous things and gifts, and usual and unusual spaces. A number of the contributors see Heaney as stressing the literary over the actual and as always looking at the interstices and positions of liminality and complexity. His use of literary references in his later poetry exemplifies his search for literary avatars against whom he can test his own ideas and with whom he can enter into an aesthetic and ethical dialogue. The essayists cover a great deal of Heaney’s debts to classical and modern literature—in the original languages and in translations—and demonstrate the degree to which the streets on which Heaney walked and wrote were two-way: he was influenced by Virgil, Petrarch, Milosz, Wordsworth, Keats, Rilke, and others and, in turn, had an impact on contemporary poets. This remarkable collection will appeal to scholars and literary critics, undergraduates as well as graduate students, and to the many general readers of Heaney's poetry.

Eugene O'Brien

About

Books

Join the club