Show Notes
Send us Fan Mail On today’s episode poet and critic Adam Wyeth reviews nine new poetry collections. Under the microscope are Infinity Pool by Vona Groarke; Belfast Twilight by Liam Carson; Harbour Doubts by Bebe Ahley; Over Here by Alan Gillis; Chic to be Sad by Molly Twomey; New Arcana by Jesica Traynor; The Convent of Mercy by Tom French; À la Belle Étoile: The odyssey of Jeanne by Afric McGlinchey and Scaffold by Thomas Brezing. A strong poet of coffee needed! This episode is supported b...
More from Books for Breakfast (Ireland)
Send us Fan Mail On today’s show we go to Hodges Figgis in Dublin’s Dawson Street to talk to Elizabeth Wassell Montague about her new novel At the Villa Celeste which she launched at the bookshop recently. The novel is a haunting story of longing, memory, and the fragile architecture of identity. When Clementine Dove begins to fall apart under the weight of familial love and unspoken trauma, she finds herself turning to France for a kind of salvation. In Paris and along the Côte...
Send us Fan Mail Most poets write under their given names – Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Denise Riley, Elizabeth Bishop. Some on the other hand use pseudonyms; there is no such person as Biddy Jenkinson, except in her poems; Pablo Neruda was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in order not to offend his family. And of course there is Fernando Pessoa who wrote under a series of heteronymns – Alvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro the keeper of sheep, the artistocratic monarchist Ricardo Reis,...
Send us Fan Mail This year marks the 45th anniversary of Salmon Poetry now based in The Salmon Bookshop and Literary Centre, in Ennistymon, County Clare. We invited poet and critic Ciarán O’Rourke, whose own new collection, Prophetstown, is published by Irish Pages in August, to review four new poetry books from Salmon Poetry. And we talk to US poet Tess Barry, a native of Western Pennsylvania who lives in Pittsburgh, about her debut collection The Marvelous Real, a published by Meadowl...
Send us Fan Mail Epistolary novels used to be all the rage Think Clarissa, think Dracula, think the more recent We need to talk about Kevin. Last year saw another smash hit epistolary novel, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, published to wide acclaim and stellar sales, and shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Fiction prize . Three times a week, 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp sits down at her desk in her Maryland home to write her letters. Her correspondence has been, as she puts it, "the mainst...
Send us Fan Mail On today's show we travel down the road to Carlow University Pittsburgh's MFA in Creative Writing Program during its annual June residency at Trinity College, Dublin where we have been invited to interview novelist Caitriona Lally about her latest book, the memoir Home Economics. So grab that flat white, latte, tea and rasher sandwich and have a listen to Caitriona's fascinating account of balancing life as a cleaner in the housekeeping department of Trinity College with the ...