OnTheTown: To have one book launch in one week, Mr Boran, may be regarded as an achievement; to have two looks excessive! Writer and poet Pat Boran was the centre of attention at two separate events in Dublin this week when two books by the man from Portlaoise were published.
Friends gathered at Poetry Ireland for the publication of his New and Selected Poems, which includes work from five previous collections as well as new verse. And earlier in the week, an updated version of Boran's The Portable Creative Writing Workshop was welcomed by poet Tony Curtis at the Irish Writers' Centre in Parnell Square.
"He is an old-fashioned craftsman . . . His writing is very clear, easy to read," said Curtis. "It's a treasure-trove of sound advice."
He added that it is "packed with imaginative ideas . . . It's a book that should always be available to writers". Curtis said he carried The Portable Creative Writing Workshop, which first appeared in 1999, "to Falcarragh, Clifden, Allihies, even to Hobart, Tasmania - places where goats have a hard existence".
"He is undoubtedly one of the finest workshop facilitators on the island. Still, he can be strange - but luckily, making poetry is strange," Curtis concluded, with a twinkle in his eye.
Among those who gathered to celebrate the publication were IT consultant Hughie Hallahan, journalist Elaine Larkin, and the education officer at the James Joyce Centre, David Butler.
"Writing is a funny business, and it is a business, as I've discovered," said Boran, who is programme director of the Dublin Writers' Festival and has recently taken over from John F Deane as publisher and editor of Dedalus Press. "I am very much aware of looking at my own experience from an outside point of view, of trying to recognise the universal and the remarkable in whatever average life you have."
New and Selected Poems, by Pat Boran, is published by Salt Publishing. The Portable Creative Writing Workshop is published by New Island