LooseLeaves: Co Tyrone-born poet Nick Laird has made it to the shortlist for The Forward Prizes for Poetry 2005. Laird's collection, To a Fault (Faber), is among five books up for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection with a prize of £5,000 (€7,200).
The five poets up for the main Forward Prize for Best Collection are John Burnside, David Harsent, Alan Jenkins, Alice Oswald and John Stammers. The £1,000 (€1,440) Prize for Best Single Poem is now being given in the name of the poet Michael Donaghy who died suddenly last year. One of the poems shortlisted for it, Passages by Londoner Sarah Maguire, initially appeared in the periodical Irish Pages. The prizes will be announced on October 5th.
Pot shots at Potter
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince may inevitably have broken sales records and topped the bestseller lists within hours of its release last weekend, but the reviews which swiftly followed were mixed. Because it was a breaking news story rather than just a literary event, many reviewers had to digest its 607 pages within hours to file either overnight or within a day or two. Amanda Craig in the Times correctly said that while nothing would stop children enjoying this penultimate instalment of the saga, it was, like its predecessor, overlong and padded out with accounts of Voldemort's youth that did little to advance the plot. "Rowling, for all her genius, has been pushed into producing too much, too fast. The sixth Harry Potter book is gripping, benign and wise but no longer inspired."
Writing in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, like other reviewers, found that with its harrowing denouement and the death of yet another important person in Harry's life it was the darkest and most unsettling instalment yet, "eventually becoming positively Miltonian in its darkness", at one point maybe being too alarming for its youngest readers. The NYT also noted that the Hogwarts Express taking Harry and co off to school leaves from King's Cross Station, now inextricably linked with the London bombings. The book chain WH Smith hastily relocated their scheduled launch party for the book from King's Cross to a venue in Wimbledon after the bombs, feeling that it would be insensitive to proceed with a celebratory event there in the aftermath of such a horrific attack.
Confessing to exhaustion after reading it through the early hours of last Saturday, Robert McCrum in the Observer asked the question, "How good is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince?", before giving his own short answer: "To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, people who like this sort of thing will find that this is the sort of thing they like." It was a book for Potter fans, who would be delighted, and perhaps for a few Potter converts, and in her high-octane climax Rowling had begun to make a claim to more serious consideration. But the dominant theme of HP6 was the tying up of loose ends in preparation for the final volume, the fabled HP7.
Finally, in her Irish Times review last Monday, Eileen Battersby's verdict was that the book was tougher, sadder, curiously more realistic, more blunt: "For all the magic, it is less magical."
Reading kids' minds
Children's literature will be under the spotlight at a conference in Trinity College Dublin next month. The International Research Society for Children's Literature Congress has taken as its theme Expectations and Experiences - Children, Childhood and Children's Literature, and it runs from August 13th to 17th. Speakers include UCD's Declan Kiberd, poet Paul Muldoon and poet, novelist and broadcaster Michael Rosen, author of many books for children and poetry collections including Quick, Let's Get Out of Here. Panel presentations will include ones on Irish Illustration Today featuring PJ Lynch, Niamh Sharkey and Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick; Poetry featuring Rita Ann Higgins, Mary Shine Thompson, Seamus Cashman and Áine Ní Ghlinn; Representations of Children in Writing Today featuring Gillian Cross and Siobhán Parkinson, and Interpreting Irish Legends in Graphic Novels presented by Cartoon Saloon. Participants from more than 30 countries will be attending. Details from www.irscl.ac.uk
Written in stones
It never rains but it pours; two missives from Bective, Co Meath reached this column lately. One from An Taisce Meath Association was to alert the public about damage to the stones of Bective Bridge which, judging by the photograph supplied, is severe. Given the literary associations of the area which include William Wilde, PJ Dunleavy, FR Higgins and Mary Lavin, author of Tales from Bective Bridge, the organisation wants to highlight the problem in the hope of getting it rectified. The other missive was an alert that the literary links with this neck of the woods continue. A night of poetry and song takes place in the Bective Bar next Tuesday at 8.30pm. Readings will be given by members of the Meath Writers' Circle, run in association with the VEC.