While paying due tribute to the memory of the man himself, the collection primarily seeks to establish a series of important critical perspec- tives through which Healy’s writings can be properly viewed and assessed. Healy was an accomplished poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and editor, and so these essays and observations address the entire range of his eclectic and exciting oeuvre. Writing the Sky: Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy is a comprehensive collection of critical essays, memoirs, poetry, and other writerly responses devoted to the life and work of the late Dermot Healy (1947– 2014).
Key words: Irish feminine, “Mother Ireland,” re-visiting Ireland, nostalgia, Irish short stories. Her short stories approach the Irish identity from within, narrating the present from a close distance. Keegan delves into a sociological depiction of this new Ireland. Her fiction does not represent a commemoration of loss nor a return to nostalgia but, rather, a celebration of a twofold newness in Irish society as a whole and in the role of the Irish woman in particular. Among many other issues, Claire Keegan’s short fiction revisits O’Brien’s “Mother Ireland” and questions traditional and hegemonic approaches to this eternal Irish feminine within a new discourse of Ireland. In Antarctica (1999) and Walking the Blue Fields (2007), short story writer Claire Keegan’s compelling fictional skills do not only offer a re-visioning of those eternal ideals of Ireland’s past. This paper revisits that Mother Ireland of O’Brien’s fiction that has transformed herself into a (M)other Ireland best expressed through a new contemporary portrayal of her plights and predicaments. "īack in 1976 Edna O’Brien published a series of essays entitled Mother Ireland in which her aim was to portray an eternal and contemporary Ireland that seemed to be anchored in a line of ancestry and remembrance, legend and truth. This collection confirms the enduring significance of Aidan Higgins as one of the major writers of our time, and also offers testament that Higgins’s work is being rediscovered by a new generation of critics and writers. Langrishe too is revisited, while convincing cases are made for the major significance of later novels such as Bornholm Night-Ferry and Lions of the Grunewald, as well as Higgins’s unorthodox trilogy of autobiographies.
Authors like Annie Proulx, John Banville, Derek Mahon, Dermot Healy, and Higgins himself, represented by a previously uncollected essay, offer a variety of critical and creative commentaries, while scholars such as Keith Hopper, Peter van de Kamp, George O’Brien, and Gerry Dukes contribute exciting new perspectives on all aspects of Higgins’s writing, including his radio plays, his critical work, and the Harold Pinter film adaptation of Langrishe, Go Down. "Drawing together a wide range of focused critical commentary and observation by internationally renowned scholars and writers, this collection of essays offers a major reassessment of Aidan Higgins’s body of work almost fifty years after the appearance of his first book, Felo De Se.