TIGH LITRÍOCHTA
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Welcome to the Munster Literature Centre Founded in 1993, the Munster Literature Centre (Tigh Litríochta) is a non-profit arts organisation dedicated to the promotion and celebration of literature, especially that of Munster. To this end, we organise festivals, workshops, readings and competitions. Our publishing section, Southword Editions, publishes a biannual journal, poetry collections and short stories. We actively seek to support new and emerging writers and are assisted in our efforts through funding from Cork City Council, Cork County Council and the Arts Council of Ireland. Originally located in Sullivan's Quay, the centre moved to its current premises in the Frank O'Connor House (the author's birthplace) at 84 Douglas Street, in 2003. In 2000, the Munster Literature Centre organised the first Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival, an event dedicated to the celebration of the short story and named for one of Cork's most beloved authors. The festival showcases readings, literary forums and workshops. Following continued growth and additional funding, the Cork City - Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award was introduced in 2005, coinciding with Cork's designation as that year's European Capital of Culture. The award is now recognised as the single biggest prize for a short story collection in the world and is presented at the end of the festival. In 2002, the Munster Literature Centre introduced the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize, an annual short story competition dedicated to one of Ireland's most accomplished story writers and theorists. This too is presented during the FOC festival. The centre also hosts the Cork Spring Literary Festival each year. Workshops are held by featured authors in both autumn and spring, allowing the general public to receive creative guidance in an intimate setting for a minimal fee. In addition, the centre sponsors a Writer in Residence each year. We invite you to browse our website for further information regarding our events, Munster literature, and other literary information. Should you have any queries, we would be happy to hear from you.
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Forty Four
Selected Poems from Forty Four
Beauty Will Save the World (for Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
I swore it, Fyodor Michażloviez, as I put fresh eggs and apples on your grave, my first time in Russia, I swore it: beauty will save the world.
I kept dancing all night long in a ballroom filling more and more with love as it grew emptier, and you were asking who I was and whom I had met, what I had seen. And I, just saying, beauty, beauty: a small bird on a white stone, its red beak, sweet bread, smiles, the depth of Lake Baikal in the steppes of Siberia, kissing and sighing in Russian, saying beauty will save the world. Mad with emotion I embraced the Russian (maybe Rogozhin) snaking my limbs from head to heel all around his body while drinking champagne, when I touched, on his calf, like a snag on a silver birch, the duty gun.
Beauty will save the world. One more short throw on the roulette, Maestro.
Beauty will save the poor eaters of potatoes, breathed upon by the steam of hot food, rising like a photographic image forming in the darkroom of lack; will save those who eat the sacred food of love breathing from the steam that rises from a warm wood after rain through which an airship sails; will save those who eat the last fragments of beauty breathed out in the steam hissing from the showerheads in the concrete gas chambers. O Christ, I am not complaining.
Seven minutes later, the doors were opened. Men in gas masks, men who were themselves prisoners too, came in and carried out the corpses, which they had to prise apart. They had, at the last, cleaved together in little clusters now hard to separate.
In the middle of this chalice of arms and legs the saviour suffered, throwing himself into the air, to the beauty.
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A Roman Elegy
There are these feelings that do not want to go away: an alcove with seven windows of rain; a saloon of stuccoed walls with reliefs of faces over garlands of roses. They call silence back to the real.
And of course, too, the mug with the image of a wolf. Alone, in this hollow room, trying to rest amidst hillocks of clothes piled high on a bed supported by four indefatigable legs with their clawed feet I was the only prey.
I was his she-wolf, sprawled out, taking ease after interminable toil on a bank of the Tiber down which his basket had sailed.
We were hoped together as in a ring. In the despair of the one who still is in love I call to you for help. I think I can do this because you did not defame me; you brought me food, you gave me a coat of arms, a sword, and a bench in a white church.
And you left also, in me, a resolve, should it happen that I am expelled from the pack, to be wolf, lone wolf.__________
What I Learned from Bodhan
That, when we fall in love it should be beautiful, so that when love ends something remains that is mysterious.
That, although psychology can unlock secrets of belief and unbelief, without love nothing steady can be made that goes on through the night.
That, in the labyrinth water will stagnate and poison us with the minotaur of sorrow, but that, also, only the places where it is possible to get lost are worth the journey.
That, Uz, the land of Job, was, in the twentieth century, the concentration camps, where God’s will was amazed by hope for a new Revelation.
That, after the Last Supper Adam and Eve got married.
That, as we believe less and less in the Heavenly Kingdom, we more quickly touch the lives of others, and let them enter into us while on this earth.
That, a poet being an animal of mythology, it should be hunted as it runs, so the two strongest virtues may not vanish from the earth: resignation and revolt.
Copyright ©2005 Dana Podracká English translation Copyright ©2005 Robert Welch
Dana Podracká was born in 1954 in Banská Štiavnica in Slovakia. She studied psychology at Comanius University, Bratislava, after which she worked as an editor in a publishing house. Poetry collections include: The Moon Lover (1981), Winter Guests (1984); Scripture (1993); Name (1999) Catacombs (2004). She has also published collections of essays and books for children. In 2002 she entered the Slovak Parliament as an M.P. in the People’s Party Movement. She believes that poetry provides a counterweight to the global impulse by looking into the interior, and that this countervailing is essential to human survival.
Robert Welch is a novelist, poet and critic. His poetry collections include Muskerry (1991), Secret Societies (1997) and The Blue Formica Table (1999); fiction includes The Kilcolman Notebook (1994), Groundwork (1997) and Tearmann (1997, in Irish). Amongst his critical works are Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats (1980), Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (1993), A History of the Abbey Theatre: Form and Pressure (1999). He was editor of the Oxford Companion to Literature (1996). Groundwork was a New York Times Book of the Year in 1998. He was born in Cork, educated at Coláiste Chríost Rí, University College, Cork, and Leeds University. Married with four children, he is a Professor of English at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland.
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Read Southword Journal Online
Supplement 18 now online.
Sean Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition
now closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
Best Irish Poetry in English 2010
Visit our bookstore here.
Poetry International.org
The Munster Literature Centre produces the Irish section of this prestigious poetry site. Current featured poets are from Landing Places, the new Dedalus anthology of immigrant poets. For further information, please visit the site at www.poetryinternational.org.
Festivals
The Munster Literature Centre hosts two annual festivals. The larger Cork City - Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival takes place each September, while the Cork Spring Literary Festival, with varying themes, is presented each spring. Further information is available on our drop down menus.
Workshops
Workshops in poetry and fiction run in Spring and Winter at MLC. Contact Jennifer for more information.
Munster Literature Centre
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©2009 The Munster Literature Centre |
Frank O'Connor House, 84 Douglas Street, Cork, Ireland. Tel. (353) 021 4312955, Email: munsterlit(AT)eircom(DOT)net |
Irish Registered Charity No.12374 |
