Review: The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’Donnell

Paraic O’Donnell distinguished himself with his début novel The Maker of Swans (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2016) as one of the finest of his generation of novelists in Ireland. This accolade is sustained with the appearance of his new novel, The House on Vesper Sands. The sheer quality of his writing, coupled with his sense of how to grasp the reader in a compelling storyline, identifies him as a novelist of ingenuity, poetry and semantic and linguistic brilliance.

Monuments to Yugoslavia: Understanding Tito’s Modernist Memorials

The Irish poet Richard Murphy (1927-2018) kept a series of prose Notebooks throughout his writing life in order to develop and hone materials for his poetry. Some excerpts from these Notebooks have been published as In Search of Poetry (Clutag Press, 2017) and we now have privileged insight into a series of meditations by Murphy on monumental structures that he used in his collection The Price of Stone (Faber & Faber, 1985) to ‘give voice’ to his poetic concerns. Each stone monument is a persona that speaks on behalf of the poet, a technique of displacement that enables Murphy to avoid any overt confessionalism. Many of them are notably redundant structures with no living relevance in contemporary (1980s) Dublin, or for the 21st century. The Wellington Testimonial in Phoenix Park, for example, speaks ‘about itself today … as a monument isolated in a country and a century that have changed … celebrating things or people that nobody remembers …’ (Murphy 2017,136) and it appears as ‘an Anglo-Irish obelisk, an immense landmark that has lost its purpose but kept its style’(139)