The time will come, perhaps,
(But death will come first)
When we may be able to visit
The dead and where they lived
When we first knew them,
And then, though they will not
Be able to see us, we shall
Look at those faces we
Loved once with better thanks
And more praise than we gave,
Or were able to give,
In those moments – how few
They were – of love expressed, and
More praise and thanks, too,
Than we can show even now,
Even now when regret
For the things we have lost,
Les choses perdus which we chose
To lose, would seem to have made us
Capable of showing,
And of saying, too, what
We are mindful of, so bitterly,
Because we cannot help
Imagining that there is
A heaven on earth at all times,
And those so disembodied bodies
We knew once have found there
A joy that is like our own
In thinking lovingly of them,
Though love maybe was not
What we felt at the time, nor did
The places seem as lovely
As they do now in memory,
So that in this mistaken joy
The dead and ourselves are
Reconciled to a world they grew
Weary of, and that we are
Growing weary of, too,
And refreshed then by
Our shared tiredness,
In the heart-felt way of
What the aging, perforce,
Think is the best way of
Passing their remaining
Time on earth, that is to say
Looking back (unlike the new
Born, who look forward with
The cry of the newly homeless),
In thankful recollection
Of the world as it once was,
Or, rather, as it once
Was not, perfect in –
The French are to blame for this too –
Its imperfection.

Brian Lynch

Peter Jankowsky’s translation

click to enlarge, click image for slide show

The Winner of Sorrow

THE WINNER OF SORROW
Brian Lynch
Published October 2005
New Island Books
PRICE: €11.99

ISBN: 9781905494255
and
Dalkey Archive, $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-56478-521-3

The Winner of Sorrow can be ordered from New Island Books.

The Winner of Sorrow, a novel about the poet William Cowper (1731-1800), was published in 2005 by New Island Books, Dublin and by the Dalkey Archive Press, Illinois, in 2009. It was shortlisted for the Hughes & Hughes Novel of the Year Award,.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID IN THE US:
Publishers Weekly
The Winner of Sorrow Brian Lynch. Dalkey Archive, $14.95 paper (364p) ISBN
978-1-56478-521-3

Irish poet and filmmaker Lynch’s first novel is an engaging fictional
account of the life of the little-remembered 18th-century English poet
William Cowper. Told primarily in flashback, Lynch introduces Cowper as an old man, plagued by self-loathing, sickness and hallucinations. His
formative years are marked by the death of his mother and early inclinations
toward poetry, ‘contemplating the taste of words.’ Along with the major
figures in Cowper’s life‹the charismatic Rev. John Newton, real-life author
of ‘Amazing Grace’; John Johnson, Cowper’s young cousin; and Mary Unwin, the love of his life, Lynch also lends Dickensian detail to minor characters, using them skillfully to provide an orbiting view. Lynch takes a serial approach, managing to take readers by surprise in every short chapter, whether terrifying (as in the height of Cowper’s hallucinations) or hilarious (‘[p]oetry and puking were hardly ideal companions’). This curious novel captures the sad poet from all angles, reimagining his life in a
gracefully sprawling epic.

Library Journal, December 2008

Published in Ireland in 2005, this justly praised novel imagines the
troubled life of 18th-century English poet William Cowper. Along with
Christopher Smart and John Clare, Cowper is often read as one of the
great eccentrics in English literature. Lynch brilliantly reconsiders
Cowper’s life in terms that raise questions about the sympathies binding sanity and creativity, devotion and damnation, as well as the emotional and spiritual austerities and excesses that alternately inspire and inhibit creativity and purpose. Lynch’s portrayal of the poet, however, is neither academic nor sentimental. Rather, he evokes Cowper’s complex interior and exterior realities with a cool affection and humor that ultimately preserve his essential humanity. Lynch is a practiced and celebrated author in many genres – poetry, drama, and film, among them- and this work is a remarkable testament to his gifts as a storyteller as well as his mastery of language. This novel about a largely forgotten English poet by an Irish writer in his prime is highly recommended.
J.G.Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

BOOK REVIEW / DISCOVERIES
‘The Winner of Sorrow
By Susan Salter Reynolds
February 8, 2009 LA Times
And Newsday March 3

William Cowper, born in England in 1731, wrote hymns and poems inspired by his
love of nature and his devotion to evangelical Christianity. Cowper suffered
from depression all his life; he tried several times to commit suicide. Brian
Lynch’s novel cleaves closely to the life of the forgotten poet, unlucky in love
and convinced that eternal damnation awaited him. Lynch’s dark humor saves
Cowper from another form of the endless afterlife: the heavy legacy of the
little-read, suicidal poet. Cowper, Lynch writes by way of an introduction, “was
sure that he had always been too contemptible to be loved by any living
creature, but that loving him had destroyed the lives of four women, three wild
hares and a linnet.” Lynch gives us the lovable Cowper, no easy feat. He
resurrects the poet’s immortality, makes him modern in his abject vulnerability.

Powells.com Books online

A fictional imagining of the gentle but troubled zealot William
Cowper–best known as a precursor to Romantics such as Wordsworth and
Burns–Brian Lynch’s The Winner of Sorrow brings to life the mind and
times of an eighteenth-century poet. Intense and exhilerating, this is
literary fiction at its finest–the reader will be hard-pressed not to
rush ahead to see what happens next. Yet you’ll want to savor every word
as Lynch traces Cowper’s tragic descent into madness, which is presented
matter-of-factly so that the novel is not sentimental but austere, not
precious but serious, and yet, remarkably, lively, sensuous, and blackly
comic.

Quarterly Conversation
Review by Rebecca Hussey

William Cowper, an 18th-century British poet not widely read today outside of
classrooms, lingers in our cultural memory as the author of some still-popular
hymns and a collection of poems that include “The Castaway” and “The Task.” We
may remember such lines as “Oh for a closer walk with God” and “God moves in a
mysterious way,” even if we probably don’t remember Cowper as their author. But,
he was beloved during and shortly after his time, known as a poet who cared
deeply for animals and the natural world, and one who was sensitive to the
plight of the poor.
In The Winner of Sorrow, originally published in Ireland in 2005 and
recently released Stateside by Dalkey Archive Press, poet Brian Lynch offers a
fictional retelling of Cowper’s life. The novel is, obviously, historical
fiction, and yet it doesn’t feel like it, at least when compared to the kind of
historical novel that packs in period detail. Rather, Winner’s terrain is more
interior: Cowper is a fascinating subject for a psychological study, and, rather
than in describing Cowper’s material circumstances, Lynch’s interest lies in
portraying the depths of Cowper’s consciousness through recurring images and
dreams. Though he focuses tightly on Cowper, Lynch nonetheless captures the
feeling of the man’s era (Cowper lived from 1731 to 1800); he does it through
the characters themselves, utilizing thoughts, conversations, and letters that
evoke an 18th-century sensibility.
Lynch opens the novel with Cowper as an old man, moving in and out of insanity
and living with a young relative and a female caretaker (one of many
mother-substitutes Lynch will discover in Cowper’s life). From here, flashbacks
take us to scenes from his childhood, and we move back and forth between young
and old Cowper in a series of abrupt shifts.
The novel’s early chapters weave a tapestry of Cowper’s troubled consciousness
that then sets up and explains the middle section of the novel—Cowper’s adult
life—where we see how his childhood wounds manifest themselves in maturity. This
middle section is told in a more straightforward, chronological manner, but it
still evidences some of the first section’s formal difficulty: the short
chapters often introduce new material abruptly, jarring readers and forcing them
to situate the narrative again and again. Eventually, a final section returns
the story to the beginning: Cowper as an old man taking stock of his life.
Lynch’s frequent jumps in time and scene require careful attention, but the
attention is well-paid, as the juxtapositions reveal the recurring images and
deep-seated patterns of Cowper’s life and offer the satisfaction of piecing
together an identity and understanding the poet’s mind.
And what a mind it is: Cowper is a psychoanalyst’s dream. His mother dies in
childbirth when he is six, and he never recovers from the loss, spending the
rest of his life searching for replacement figures (which he is able to find in
abundance). In addition to the wound left by his lost mother, Cowper is
impotent: in a schoolyard bullying scene, two boys yank down his pants,
revealing a penis “no bigger than a snail’s foot.” Afterward, a “secret voice”
in his head chants, “I am a different boy, I am a different boy.”
It is a scarring experience, one that leaves him feeling isolated and
inadequate. Snails begin to haunt Cowper, appearing in life and in dreams as
images of sexuality and of death. When the young Cowper finds a snail in the eye
socket of a skull, he picks it up and “he saw what the skull saw, and he
thought, This is death, and this will happen to everyone else, but of all the
people in the world, I, William Cowper, I alone am fated not to die.” This hope
for immortality is soon replaced by an obsession with death and fear of sex,
both of which Cowper continually approaches, only to shy away from.
At the age of 32 he has his first brush with his own death: Cowper suffers a
mental breakdown, attempts suicide several times, and retreats to an asylum. In
his convalescence he converts to Evangelicalism and inaugurates a pattern that
continues for the rest of his life: hope in God mixing with despair,
self-loathing and guilt mixing with compassion and love, the conviction that he
is damned to hell mixing with the desire for life. As the very first paragraph
of the novel explains:
William Cowper . . . believed in Christ and his infinite mercy, although he
was also convinced that God hated him personally and was intent on sending him
to hell, soon, for all eternity. That the belief and the conviction
contradicted each other he understood clearly. He understood, too, that he was
completely insane, or rather almost completely, but not quite. In the same
nearly perfect way, he was sure that he had always been too contemptible to be
loved by any living creature, but that loving him had destroyed the lives of
four women, three wild hares and a linnet.
That Cowper places the three wild hares and the linnet on the same footing as
the four women is revealing; those women become the mother figures he craves, as
well as sisters and almost-lovers in a bewildering combination of roles and
relationships, but they never achieve the top place in Cowper’s affections.
Cowper’s wounds make him capable only of an abstract, partial kind of love, and
it’s a testament to his attractive powers that he is continually surrounded by
women who are willing to live with what he could offer. What we see, ultimately,
is a deeply wounded man seeking the only kind of happiness he is capable of.
Cowper feels both gratitude and guilt toward the women who care enough about him
to make sacrifices for his sake. It’s a sad story: though Cowper knows he has
much to answer for, he is powerless to do anything about it.
The Winner of Sorrow goes beyond psychology: it also hints at Cowper’s
importance as a poet, making him into a quintessential late 18th-century figure
in the way his poetic interests turn away from public, social matters and look
to the interior world: “He was making an exploration out of, or rather into, the
ordinary—like Captain Cook, but in reverse.” However, Lynch resists the common
interpretation of Cowper as mere antecedent to the Romantics, instead portraying
him as an important poet in his own right. Near the novel’s end, Cowper receives
an illustrated letter from William Blake (an invention on Lynch’s part) in which
he hails Cowper as “the Son of Albion in the Evening of his Decay” and claims
him as “Your Friend in Milton.” Cowper wants nothing to do with this tribute. He
thinks only that Blake “is obviously a revolutionary, or an agent for the
government, or a plain lunatic, or all three” and later gives his servant
permission to use the letter as lining for a bucket. Cowper does not understand,
and does not wish to understand, why this representative of a new generation of
poets reveres him. This episode, and the novel as a whole, implies that Cowper’s
poetic achievement is important not so much for the way he helped usher in a new
poetic era, but for his unique sensibility: his tormented mix of compassion,
suffering, faith, and uncertainty. It is here that Lynch’s interests in Cowper’s
psychology and his poetry combine: we should read him, the novel implies,
because he shows us the difficult and unlikely conditions from which art can
emerge.
In the end, perhaps the novel’s central insight is, as one character says,
“Misery usually stands in the way of creation, William, but in your case it
opens the road . . . because you know that composing puts off your being
decomposed.” We are all composing and decomposing every moment of our lives, and
the best we can hope for, like Cowper, is to compose something beautiful, if
only to postpone the moment of decomposition a little longer. The Winner of
Sorrow is itself a success on these terms: a beautiful composition that will
challenge readers and reward them with both a glimpse into a struggling artist’s
life and a contemplation of what it means to “win” at sorrow.
Rebecca Hussey is an assistant professor of English at Norwalk Community College
in Connecticut. She blogs as “Dorothy W.” at Of Books and Bicycles.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID IN THE IRELAND:

While the €10,000 Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year seemed destined for Banville’s The Sea, this category’s shortlist selection drew deserved attention to one of the finest Irish books of recent years, Brian Lynch’s beautiful novel The Winner of Sorrow, which was published by Irish publisher New Island Books. Based on the life of the 18th-century English poet William Cowper, this graceful and witty narrative is a study of an eccentric genius which makes brilliant use of the respective nuances of Regency social history as well as the darker themes of guilt and psychological tragedy. If Banville always looked the winner, he had worthy competition in Lynch.
From the report of the award ceremony by Eileen Battersby in the Irish Times, March 2, 2006

At once moving, instructive and slyly funny – that rare thing, a recuperation of a poet by a poet.
–John Banville, The Irish Times Books of the Year 2005

One of the finest Irish books of recent years.
–Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

The Winner of Sorrow is a novel based on the life of the gentle poet, William Cowper – an evocation of his bizarre households and the wider world of late-eighteenth-century England as loving as it is deeply imagined and wholly original. Brian Lynch’s book is a brilliant tragi-comedy, aswirl with contradictory emotions – piety and passion, pity and fear, despair and hope, madness and practicality. Seen from so insightful a perspective.Cowper’s wildly troubled life is a thriller, and the reader is tempted to rush forward with the plot. Can the women who love William heal the wounds caused by loss? Can peace ever descend on his turbulent spirit? At the same time, one reads as slowly as possible, the better to prolong the encounter with a book that satisfies on many levels – that is profoundly serious, but also warm, witty, and very beautiful. – Nuala O Faolain

If you want the low-down and high-down on the delicate, brutal reality of a poet’s life, you must read The Winner of Sorrow. –Paul Durcan,

Beautifully written, poignant, witty and profound. –Clare Boylan,

The Winner of Sorrow is not just a remarkably vivid excursion into the mind of a remarkable poet cut adrift by genius, but also a brilliant re-imagining of an extraordinary age. –Dermot Bolger

A wonderful book.
–Arminta Wallace, Irish Times. Full Review

It is a tribute to Lynch’s achievement that you close the book with the conviction that reading the work of William Cowper is not simply advisable but necessary. – Eamonn Sweeney, The Irish Book Review. Full Review

A wonderful book. –Rachel Andrews, Sunday Tribune. Full Review

A triumph.–Siobhan Hegarty, Sunday Independent. Full Review

A Cowper for our times. –Tony Seward, Cowper and Newton Bulletin Full Review

As you can see, the narrator of this book is witty, urbane with a sense of the ridiculous and how it touches human sadness. Lynch is also an accomplished poet and there is passage after passage here of startling, verbal beauty, never ostentatious, always integrated into the story. –Thomas Kilroy,The Irish Independent Full Review

His fictionalisation of the life of William Cowper, an almost forgotten poet, is so momentous that it would certainly have made a very watchable period drama –Katie Moten, RTE.ie Entertainment Full Review

]]> http://www.brianlynch.org/the-winner-of-sorrow/feed/ 0 http://www.brianlynch.org/new-and-renewed-poems-1967-2004/ http://www.brianlynch.org/new-and-renewed-poems-1967-2004/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:51:18 +0000 admin http://www.brianlynch.org/?p=165

New and Renewed Poems 1967-2004

New and Renewed
Poems 1967-2004
Dublin, New Island Books 2004
ISBN 1904301568

PRICE: €9.99

New and Renewed can be ordered from New Island Books.

Such exceptional talent – Samuel Beckett

NEW AND RENEWED
Poems 1967-2004
Review by Philip Casey
The Irish Independent
23 Oct 2004

Brian Lynch’s poetry and its rhythms have beguiled me since reading a poem called Panic Stricken Love in his chapbook Outside the Pheasantry, (1975). This poem was included in his collection Perpetual Star (1981), as Panic Stricken, and here it is named Panic. Other than this, not a word has been changed from the original. Other poems have been altered, of course, hence the book’s clever title. The Jews Escape (‘the yellow stars are ours’), previously entitled Ghost House, is practically a new poem.

In New and Renewed, Lynch has not only written powerful new work, but has examined the premise of each line and phrase to realise the full potency of that previously collected. It is a very potent collection indeed, and not just because its theme is often Eros in the everyday.

Even when the poem is not overtly erotic, a sensual energy pervades it. Without artistry it would be as nothing, of course. Lynch’s hard-won imagery stays long in the mind, and is marked by interplay and interdependence. Take Pension Alcoy, which has also had its lines and line breaks renewed. In the original I loved ‘To be empty you must be played upon’, but the change seems exactly right, the gong reverberating through a thousand windows until stillness reigns:

To be open you must be empty
To be empty you must be struck
As if you were a gong.

Outside the window
The window is open
Its window is open
And a thousand more
And suddenly there is no more Mr Lynch.

This interplay and interdependence underscores the noted humanity of Lynch’s work, and is its hallmark. Relationship is central, and meditations on the death of parents, the regrets of love, the complexities of marriage, and the mysteries of parenthood uncover deep emotion, as with the daughters of Myth:

But when they do return
The house is empty in the sun,
Mother has gone north or south,
And, there now, fatherless,
The door is wider than it was,
Or wider than they thought.

The book ends with powerful political poems, including an eleven page excerpt from Angry Heart, Empty House, entitled The Murder of Margaret White, which really belongs in a book of its own. It is based on a harrowing true story, and will stalk your dreams.

Brian Lynch’s poems have always been haunting. With New and Renewed Poems it seems inevitable that he will be given the wider recognition he has so long deserved.

Philip Casey

]]> http://www.brianlynch.org/new-and-renewed-poems-1967-2004/feed/ 0 http://www.brianlynch.org/pity-for-the-wicked/ http://www.brianlynch.org/pity-for-the-wicked/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:33:00 +0000 admin http://www.brianlynch.org/?p=155

Pity for the Wicked. Photo of Margaret Wright © Pacemaker

PITY FOR THE WICKED
Brian Lynch
Published 9 May 2005 The Duras Press
ISBN 1-873748-16-7
PRICE: €15

Pity for the Wicked can be ordered from The Duras Press.

What the critics said

“Brian Lynch’s extraordinary testament is like a shattering alarm in the middle of the night.” – Gerald Dawe, The Irish Times. Full Review

“Brian Lynch does Irish society a service by tearing the mask from murder and terror, by dispelling the fog of romanticised amnesia in which horror is embalmed as history is rewritten to justify a campaign of murder, by trying to restore the meaning of language.” – Maurice Hayes, The Irish Independent. Full Review

“One of the most devastating critiques of the savagery of the Troubles and of the hypocrisy of the ‘peace process’.” – Dennis Kennedy, The Belfast Telegraph. Full Review

I believe that the publication of Brian Lynch’s book will contribute to the isolation of Sinn Féin-IRA, and their eventual disappearance from the political map of Ireland.” –Conor Cruise O’Brien, from the Introduction

In Memory of the Childhood of Margaret Wright, by Gene Lambert

Written between 1993 and 1996, Pity for the Wicked is a contemporary depiction of a momentous period in Irish history. It was first published in a slightly different form in The Ring of Words, the anthology of the 1998 Arvon Foundation/Daily Telegraph International Poetry Competition under the title An Angry Heart, An Empty House. About the section of the poem that deals with the murder of Margaret Wright (which was published separately in New and Renewed), Philip Casey said in The Irish Independent, ’It will stalk your dreams.’ Fiona Sampson said in The Irish Times that ’it is a shaming, difficult and necessary read; and worth buying the book for in its own right.’

]]> http://www.brianlynch.org/pity-for-the-wicked/feed/ 0 http://www.brianlynch.org/playtime/ http://www.brianlynch.org/playtime/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 11:00:42 +0000 admin http://www.brianlynch.org/?p=147

Playtime

PLAYTIME
Dublin, RHA Gallagher Gallery and New Island Books 1997

Cover Painting by Gene Lambert

This book has a troubled history. Gene Lambert, who had heard me read from ‘Pity for the Wicked’ at the Dun Laoghaire poetry festival, suggested including in the book the section referring to the murder of Margaret Wright. I agreed and wrote a poem, ‘The Childhood of Margaret Wright’, tying it to the cover painting, which also appears on the back of ‘Pity for the Wicked’. There were other poems relating to the theme, and the introduction, which I wrote, explained the connections.

In Memory of the Childhood of Margaret Wright, by Gene Lambert

The then Director of the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Ciaran MacGonigal, was enthusiastic about the collaboration and, at my suggestion, arranged a co-publishing deal with New Island Books. However, shortly before the book was to go to press, Ciaran announced that he had got legal advice that the Margaret Wright extract was libellous of the people involved in her murder. I agreed reluctantly to remove the extract, the other poems and to rewrite the introduction – some, not all, of the details are set out in an appendix to ‘Pity for the Wicked’. As far as Playtime was concerned, the result was that the book was not distributed to bookshops or reviewed in the newspapers.

]]> http://www.brianlynch.org/playtime/feed/ 0 http://www.brianlynch.org/voices-from-the-nettleway/ http://www.brianlynch.org/voices-from-the-nettleway/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:55:13 +0000 admin http://www.brianlynch.org/?p=143

Voices from the Nettleway

Voices from the Nettleway
by Brian Lynch
Dublin, Raven Arts Press 1989

cover painting by Rosaleen Davy
designed by Susanne Linde

Out of print

]]> http://www.brianlynch.org/voices-from-the-nettleway/feed/ 0 http://www.brianlynch.org/easter-snow/ http://www.brianlynch.org/easter-snow/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:23:12 +0000 admin http://www.brianlynch.org/?p=138

EASTER SNOW
Bremen, die horen and Galway, Salmon Press, 1992

Poems by Brian Lynch with photographs by Peter Jankowsky. Translated into German as Oster Schnee –Ein Iland vor Irland.

Another book with a less than happy publishing history. As it was being prepared for printing, Jessie Lendennie’s Salmon Press was in grave financial difficulties and in the process of being taken over by Philip MacDonagh’s more commercial Poolbeg Press. The result was the book was poorly distributed and scarcely noticed. However, Michael Viney wrote about it warmly in The Irish Times.

Sadly, too, the quality of the reproduction of Peter’s photographs is not the best – they deserve better and I have often thought that either a new edition or an exhibition of the photos and the poems together would be a good idea.

When I wrote the majority of the poems I had never been on Clare Island, so the book is, for my part, purely, or impurely, formal.

The poem reproduced below describes a carved head in the Abbey on Clare Island – when I saw it the abbey was open to the four winds and one could only dimly see the frescoes on the ceiling through moss and mould. These extraordinary works, almost all of them secular rather than religious, have now been restored after many years of labour by Christoph Oldenbourg and others and can be seen in the Royal Irish Academy volume devoted to the fourth Clare Island survey. The images do not appear to be on the web, which is unfortunate, not least because the interpretation of their meaning is still uncertain and their significance in the iconography of European art history would seem to be great.

[Update: some pictures of the conservation are now on the web. Conservation work on the Abbey]

The Face

1.
This is a religious object,
Which means it’s hard to find,
In the ruined Cistercian Abbey
At Cille on Clare Island.

I’d searched and couldn’t see,
Yet when my German friend,
Whose photograph this is,
Showed me it was obvious,
This hidden thing, and godly.

2.
The stone on which it’s carved
Is stuck into a wall, waist
High, the first block
That butts the arch
Above the bishop’s throne,
The sedilia, as it’s known.
The other blocks that make this up
Are otherwise unmarked
With carving, and this is odd
Since as the face is side-
Ways to the vertical,
You’d think it would repeat
Until the curve were capped
And held together by
An image of the Lord.
It does not. It’s on its own.

3.
The face is mantled with a mould,
A shawl of blooming stuff, a moss
More tightly napped and emerald
Than baize. It’s earlier than the church
And probably was used by chance,
Because it fitted into place.

Because it was there and fits here.
This is an answer to anxiety,
A definition of the art of poetry.

For this face, as you can see,
Opens its mouth and sings or cries
Or shouts the glory of its maker -
In art there is no difference
Between our grief and joy: it’s all,
In high or low or no, relief.
In life there’s no confusing them.

4.
Being sideways and damaged round
The eye and nose does not affect
Its wholiness. Instead it adds to it,
As a lover sees on the beloved’s neck
A bruise and knows who made it
And for that reason will not forsake her,
The wounded creature of the day
Displaying what their night approved….

5.
Nor do I disregard, being blind
To grammar, the ambiguity above:
I knew then whose was this photograph.
This is a German face you’re looking at -
And a poet’s too and also yours,
If you have come to be this hard to find,
All those who ever have been moved
By god, the sex of art, or earthly love.

]]> http://www.brianlynch.org/easter-snow/feed/ 0 http://www.brianlynch.org/tony-omalley/ http://www.brianlynch.org/tony-omalley/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:04:52 +0000 admin http://www.brianlynch.org/?p=120

TONY O'MALLEY

TONY O’MALLEY
By Brian Lynch
Dublin, New Island Books, 2004
ISBN 1-85928-235-0

The cover of ‘Tony O’Malley’ is based on Summer Solstice, Summer Kite, 1992.
48×48 inches, oil on board


A 324 page book of essays with more than 300 illustrations, selected and introduced by Brian Lynch and first published by the Scolar Press, London and the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, in 1996. A new and revised third edition was published in 2004 by New Island Books, Dublin. The contributors were Aidan Dunne, Brian Fallon, Patrick Heron, Patrick J. Murphy, Frances Ruane, Vera Ryan, Hugh Stoddart and James White.

O’Malley has a rare and remarkable talent. He is certainly one of the most profoundly gifted painters ever to have come from Ireland. – Patrick Heron

The following is from The Butler Gallery PR for The Visual Diaries

Tony O’Malley –THE VISUAL DIARIES
Fifty Years of Tony O’Malley’s Sketchbooks
Curated by Brian Lynch
October 15–December 4, 2005
Tony O’Malley The Visual Diaries

Visual Diaries

BUTLER GALLERY PRESS RELEASE:

The Butler Gallery has had a long and proud association with Tony O’Malley, a native of Callan, Kilkenny, which we are delighted to continue with this exhibition and publication Tony O’Malley – The Visual Diaries, Fifty Years of Tony O’Malley’s Sketchbooks. O’Malley’s work is beloved, and he holds an important position in the history of 20th century Irish art. To mark this position, the Irish Museum of Modern Art will open later this month with a major retrospective of his work.

Almost every day for fifty years Tony O’Malley drew and painted in his sketchbooks. These visual diaries, as he called them, are a record not only of what he saw in front of him but of what he remembered from the distant past, often with startling clarity. Portraits of himself and his wife Jane; of friends, of poets and painters, of people in streets and shops; landscapes of Kilkenny, Clare Island, Cornwall, the Bahamas, Switzerland, the Isles of Scilly; pictures of flowers, of animals, especially cats and birds, as well as experiments in pure abstraction and colour – all of these, and more, are to be found in these stunning visual diaries.¹

Butler Gallery, The Castle, Kilkenny, Ireland
Email: info@butlergallery.com
t +353 56 7761106 f +353 56 7770031 www.butlergallery.com

¹ Lynch, Brian. Introduction in the publication ‘Tony O’Malley ’The Visual Diaries’, 2005

]]> http://www.brianlynch.org/tony-omalley/feed/ 0 http://www.brianlynch.org/caught-in-a-free-state/ http://www.brianlynch.org/caught-in-a-free-state/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 09:37:13 +0000 admin http://www.brianlynch.org/?p=116 Caught in a Free State
script by Brian Lynch
1983

RTÉ/Channel 4 co-production. 1983. Jacobs Award for script. Banff International TV Festival, Canada, award for best drama production 1984. A four-part series about German spies in Ireland during World War II.

The main spy, Dr Hermann Goertz, is played by Peter Jankowsky, with whom I subsequently translated Paul Celan: 65 Poems and who took the photographs of Clare Island about which I wrote the poems that comprise Easter Snow – Peter also translated the poems into German.

The series was directed by Peter Ormerod who went on to direct Eat the Peach before quitting the film industry in disgust to become a Ryanair pilot.

]]> http://www.brianlynch.org/caught-in-a-free-state/feed/ 0 http://www.brianlynch.org/love-rage/ http://www.brianlynch.org/love-rage/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 09:30:08 +0000 admin http://www.brianlynch.org/?p=112

Love & Rage

Love & Rage
script by Brian Lynch
1998

Feature film directed by Cathal Black, about the man who inspired Synge’s Playboy of the Western World.
Starring Greta Scacchi, Stephen Dillane, Daniel Craig (chosen in 2005 to be the new James Bond), Donal Donnelly and Valerie Edmunds.
Photographed by Slawomir Idziak (Three Colours Blue, etc)

The basis for my script is ‘The Playboy and the Yellow Woman’ by the distinguished Gaelic scholar James Carney. Carney’s book, which largely depends on a contemporary manuscript, tells the story of James Lynchehaun who was employed as land agent by Mrs Agnes McDonnell, the English owner of a large estate on Achill Island at the end of the 19th century. When she dismissed him he set fire to her house and attacked her viciously and sexually. After hiding out on the island for some six months, aided by his relatives, he was arrested and sent to jail for life. He escaped from Portlaoise Prison and fled to the United States where the Irish-American community resisted his extradition on the grounds that he was a rebel fighting against the English oppressor. The case reached the United States Supreme Court which eventually accepted that his offences were political and refused the extradition – a judgement with far-reaching consequences in the legal attitude to definitions of terrorism. Lynchehaun had some connections with the Irish republican Brotherhood, the IRB, but it seems clear that his grudge against Agnes was more personal than politicial. The script describes their relationship as an affair, but while there is some evidence for a more than business intimacy, the story I tell is purely imaginary.

The film was shot in the Valley House, on Achill Island, where the original events took place. The house, then a youth hostel, was transformed to a gloomy Victorian mansion in shades of brown and green to such effect that the owners wanted to retain it – and for all I know may have done so.

Additional footage was shot on the Isle of Man, which necessitated the movement of an enormous amount of equipment as well as of a crew and cast comprisng some one hundred people. This was just one of many factors that brought the producers to the brink of bankruptcy.

The worst result of the shortage of money and a tight shooting schedule – the film was shot in forty days – was that large chunks of the script were never shot.

For instance, the film was originally intended to begin with the riot in the Abbey Theatre on the first night of ‘The Playboy of the Western World’, during which the central character, James Lynchehaun, disguised as a priest (the sort of thing he did in real life) was supposed to congratulate Synge. Lynchehaun is referred to in the play as ‘the man bit the Yellow Woman’s nostril on the northern shore’ – this, in turn, is the culminating action in the film and in real life, an assault which led the Yellow Woman, Agnes MacDonell, to wear a silver nose. In a sense the entire film is a critique of the violent romanticism that underpins ‘The Playboy’, and I contrived the script in such a way to bring Synge and Lynchehaun face to face again at the end of the story – literally face to face in that Lynchehaun is in a position to give the artist a taste of his own medicine but, at the last moment, instead of biting his nose off, gives him a kiss. If this seems unlikely, unreal and bizarre it was meant to be, and in fact this is how I conceived the film as a whole: it was an exercise in impossibility, a test of the audience’s credulity, particularly as far as the character of Lynchehaun is concerned. In an earlier version of the script, for example, Lynchehaun seduces Agnes while he is dressedas a woman, a perverse joke that might have worked if the actor Cathal Black had chosen to play the part, a feminine-looking guy, hadn’t got cold feet and turned it down. There was, of course, no possibility of Daniel Craig passing himself off as a woman under any circumstances – Daniel is all animal man. He does, however, disguise himself as a clergyman and as Agnes’s upperclass English husband. Both disguises are so effective that I’ve met people who didn’t recognise him at all as the clergyman and, more explicably, didn’t realise he was pretending to be the husband – in the latter case you had to grasp that he has stolen a photograph of the husband and makes himself up using the photograph for the purpose. But that is by the way. In the event, Synge doesn’t appear in the film, so the literary subtext can only be grasped, if it can be grasped, by those who know that Lynchehaun is, partly, the inspiration for ‘The Playboy’.

Another example of how the script was curtailed: an important scene in the script shows Agnes returning to the Valley House after being raped by Lynchehaun in a hotel. She comes up the drive, enters the house, goes upstairs, runs a bath, changes her clothes and goes back into the bathroom, all the while engaging in dialogue with her maid Biddy, Valerie Edmunds, and her friend Dr Croly (Stephen Dillane). On the morning this sequence was to be shot, Cathal Black said he couldn’t do it – I reckon that, properly done, the sequence would have taken at least two days. So I took the script and, without even sitting down, reduced the scene to two camera set-ups, in the drive and in the doorway to the house. The latter scene, between Greta and Stephen, is very effective: in every rehearsal Greta cried, but in every take she could only act it – wonderfully well in my opinion. Indeed, I think her performance in the film is the best she has ever given in her career.

One final example, this time of editing: I myself played the part of Lynchehaun’s father (another variation of the film’s impossibilist theme) in a scene where he threatens his son with a loy, the kind of spade with which Christy Mahon, the Playboy, says he killed his father in the play. Slawomir Idziak contrived to shoot the scene, from under a black cloth, through a piece of thick distorted glass – Slawomir, or Swavek as his name is shortened in Polish, understood the intentions of the script very well and shot it, using a huge variety of his own hand-tinted lenses, in tones of green not unreminiscent, but less extreme, of Kieslowski’s ‘Short Film About Killing’. My memory of the shoot is that after repeated takes of me brandishing the dreadfully heavy loy I was so exhausted that I feared I was having a heart-attack. In the end the scene was left on the cutting-room floor.

Cathal Black Films

]]> http://www.brianlynch.org/love-rage/feed/ 0