arts and culture
« Previous Entries Next Entries »Greg Delanty: emigrant laureate
Saturday, December 2nd, 2006Colum McCann, the Dublin-born, New York-based writer, appears in the weekend section of the Irish Times today praising the work of poet Greg Delanty. Greg Delanty, born in Cork and living in Vermont, is one of Ireland’s best-known emigrant poets. This year he published “Collected Poetry, 1986 – 2006”. Born in 1958, Delanty has lived in the US for twenty years.
Colum McCann says,
I was delighted to see Greg Delanty’s ‘Collected Poems’. Delanty has cataloged an entire generation and its relationship to exile. He is the laureate of those of us who have gone.
Migration the focus of Dermot Bolger’s latest
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006Dermot Bolger, the poet who was the keynote speaker at Éan’s 2005 conference, has a new play that touches on both emigration and immigration. “The Townlands of Brazil”, playing now in Ballymun’s Axis Arts Centre, tells the stories of two young women: one, a mother who emigrates to England in the 1960s, and the second, a Polish widow and mother who immigrates to Ireland forty years later.
Bolger told the Sunday Business Post:
“My extended family would be a typical Irish family [in that] I have loads of cousins with Wolverhampton accents and Liverpool accents and very few with Irish accents.
“When I was growing up, my own generation felt that we didn’t have to emigrate, but we soon realised that we were just a brief hiccup in the system, and once the 1980s started, there was a whole generation of young people who had to go abroad again. Of course, now that has turned around, and people are coming back, and immigrants are coming in.
“But when I talk to Polish people and Romanian people who live here, I often feel that I’m looking at my uncles and aunts, and all those generations of Irish people who had to leave their homes and start new lives.”
Journal will highlight migration issues
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006A new journal is being launched this week that will be of interest to anyone working in a migration-related field. Titled Translocations: Irish Migration, Race and Social Transformation Review, the first issue will be launched by Mary Hickman on November 3 at the NCCRI.
The journal will address such topics as globalisation and migration, transnationalism and diaspora, state and racism, culture and the media, among other topics.
Its first issue includes an article by Breda Gray on “Migrant Integration Policy”, in which she discusses Ireland’s emerging emigration policy in her argument that globalisation challenges the notion of government integration policies.
Read the journal online.
Emigration the subject of Belfast-Liverpool play
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006Belfast playwright Marie Jones (Stones in his Pockets), and Liverpool playwright Maurice Bessman (Hollyoaks), have teamed up to write a musical play about the experiences of Irish emigrants circa 1969 taking the Liverpool Ferry to find a new life. Theatre company Red Lead Arts notes that it is the first time that playwrights from the two cities have collaborated and “the first time we have had an opportunity to celebrate our ‘connected’ cultures through shared stories of emigration and immigration�.
The play explores why the characters left Ireland and what happened to them until the present day, and includes reflections, says the company, on “some of the reasons and experiences that still force people to leave Ireland today.� The play is directed by Carol Moore of Red Lead Arts and plays at the Dockers Club in Belfast from October 13 to November 4.
http://www.redleadarts.org.uk/Index.asp?ID=95
Eavan Boland comments on emigrant experience
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006RTE’s radio programme Rattlebag ran a rerun of an interview with Eavan Boland, in which she spoke extensively about her experience as an Irish woman abroad, beginning with her childhood as a diplomat’s daughter. She read her poem “The Emigrant Irish�. She characterized her own experience by saying, “I was never an emigrant. I was outside my country – it’s a much more luxurious experience�.
Film to focus on 1970s-era emigrants in Britain
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006Colm Meaney will be one of the featured actors in “Kings�, a film focusing on a group of Irish emigrants living in London. Based on Jimmy Murphy’s play “The Kings of the Kilburn High Road�, the film focuses on several friends who emigrated to England in the 1970s; they are reunited at the funeral of one of the gang, who has been killed by a train. The Irish-produced film will be shot around Belfast, Dublin and London. It will be bilingual in Irish and English. The ensemble cast also includes Donal O’Kelly, Brendan Conroy, Donncha Crowley, Barry Barnes and Seán Ó Tarpaigh.
http://www.filmboard.ie/stop_press.php?press=461
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