Francis Ledwidge died in the third battle of Ypres 80 years ago last Thursday, and the anniversary is being marked all week by a series of tributes, seminars and other events. That is how it should be; though it made me wonder at the lack of attention being paid across the water to another fine poet killed in that grimmest of wars.
Edward Thomas was 39 when he was killed at Arras on April 9th, 1917, but I haven't seen his anniversary mentioned in any periodical, either in England, where he was born, or in Wales, where his parents came from. Is it because, unlike Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, he chose not to write directly about the horrors of the trenches, opting instead to evoke the English and Welsh countryside he loved so much, and to address longingly the wife and daughters from whom the war wrenched him?
"I hate not Germans," he declared in one poem, "nor grow hot with love of Englishmen, to please newspapers," yet at the age of 37 he enlisted to help protect a way of life he saw as under threat. Until then his career had largely been that of a literary hack, churning out more than 40 books of essays (mostly on nature themes) in order to support himself and his family. It was only when he met Robert Frost in London, just before the war broke out, that his true vocation was made clear to him; and the wonderful pastoral, love and family poems that followed (143 in all) were entirely the result of Frost's encouragement.
If you don't already know Thomas's work, I envy you the discovery that lies ahead - my own discovery of it was some 15 or more years ago in an exemplary edition introduced and annotated by Edna Longley. I'm not sure if that's still in print. If it is, snap it up; if not, there are other editions.
And buy also the two volumes of extraordinary memoirs, As It Was (1926) and World Without End (1931), written by Thomas's wife, Helen, with whom he had a turbulently passionate relationship and who wrote the first of them as a means of therapy to cope with the breakdown she suffered after Edward's death. Its frank depiction of their sexual life together, which shocked readers at the time, has a power and directness that are genuinely erotic, while the description in World Without End of her last sighting of Edward as he went from their country cottage off to war is heartbreaking.
These two books, along with letters to Thomas from Helen and from Frost and a memoir by the poet's daughter Myfanwy, were published in a 1988 paperback called Under Storm's Wing, published by Paladin. I sometimes see it in the bookshops, but if you have trouble getting it, that excellent press, Carcanet, are now issuing it at £9.95. In its pages you'll find much that's enthralling, as well as a real sense of the man who, as a poet, found himself: "Speaking for all who lay under the stars,/Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice."
Simon & Schuster are getting all excited by the imminent publication of Sean Hughes's first novel, The Detainees. Hughes, you will recall, is the London-born Irish comedian whose face never seemed to be off British television screens a few years ago and who was so adored by teenage girls as to alarm bemused parents - a kind of one-man Boyzone or Take That, in other words, minus the feeble music and with smart, post-modernist jokes added.
Then he seemed to vanish from the airwaves. Sean's Show suddenly became Sean's No-Show, and the aforementioned pubescent girls had to content themselves with a couple of jokey books, Sean's Book and The Grey Area, which, on the evidence of sales, proved to be no substitute.
But now he's back with a book that Simon & Schuster's publicity manager Julie Davies insists "will come as a surprise" to those familiar with the man's stage and television work - it's "by no means the type of book generally dismissed as lightweight celebrity fiction". That sounds a somewhat defensive way of introducing a book that she otherwise describes as "a dark, moving and extremely powerful" novel "set in a small, bleak town near Dublin", not to mention "a modern black thriller with a pounding heartbeat, a kicking soundtrack and lot of messed-up people".
I'm afraid, though, you'll have to wait until the publication date of September 1st to be pounded and kicked by Sean's first foray into fiction. In the meantime, his new one-man show, Alibis for Life, will be launched at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival - to the delight, no doubt, of a new generation of teenage girls.
The London-based Irish agent David O'Leary (mentioned before in this column) has a new name on his books. Sheltering from the rain some time ago in a Dublin bookstore, he picked up a children's book by Gretta Mulrooney, was impressed, contacted her, and has now just sold her first adult novel, Araby, to Flamingo.
Offaly-born and living in Northampton, the author has already had three children's books published by Poolbeg. Araby, for which a generous five-figure sum was paid by Flamingo, is described by Philip Gwyn Jones of that publishing house as "very special indeed, a beautifully-observed, hugely entertaining novel that charts an amazing relationship between a son and his mother over a lifetime."