The Western Writers Centre

Issue No. 30 of the vital literary magazine, The SHop, is just out. Full of interesting poems, some of them very different in style and content from what we’re used to. €8. 50 to you. Equally interesting is the Editorial Notes, which asks questions some poets have found, eh, difficult or even (lovely Arts Council word!) ‘divisive’ in the past. It points to a website www.threemonkeysonline.com, whereon novelist and poet William Wall writes a forceful and very important essay on Irish writers not participating in the politics of their time, entitled ‘Riding Towards the Lizard: On the Need for Anger Now - Towards a Poetics of Anger.’ God knows, one can suffer for holding such opinions, as Wall acknowledges and this writer, who has mentioned the problem many times in reviews and elsewhere, can testify; but he pushes through all of that and gives his reasons. Dave Lordan and others have replied - indeed, not to comment on this article and thereby bring it further into public light would be a sin. The Irish Times, for one, will almost certainly not mention it if they do bother to find it. So find it yourselves. Congratulations for John Wakeman at The SHop for highlighting the article and to William Wall for giving it to us. Now will it find itself copied and sent to the Arts Council under a ‘Joe Bloggs’ name as ‘proof’ that Wall is ‘divisive?’

www.threemonkeysonline.com

- Fred Johnston

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Irish novelist Frank McCourt has died in New York City at the age of 78. The author of ‘Angela’s Ashes’ had been suffering from meningitis.

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