Saturday, June 16, 2007

Added to stock at Galway City Library:

Readers may be interested in the following books which have been added to stock at Galway City Library:


Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems, by Diane Ackerman. Vintage; Reprint edition

Her best poems keep bursting off the prescribed limits of the page in the same way that great paintings burst their frames. Ackerman has energy, wit, courage, and passion. All of her is in each poem, and this 'all' reveals a woman of sensitivity, restraint, ingenuity, and passionate daring. Diane Ackerman has been hailed by several critics not only for her poetry but for her prose explorations into the world of science and natural history.


Julius Winsome, by Gerard Donovan. Faber & Faber

The title character of this novel lives alone in the deep woods of Maine, home to men “who cannot live anywhere else.” Donovan depicts Winsome's wounded humanity and psychological distress with great compassion and subtlety and vividly draws both the supporting characters and the bleak, foreboding Maine landscape. Donovan's command of language is astonishingly precise, eerily reflecting Julius's disarmingly mild-mannered pathology as it ascribes no more importance to the cold-blooded shooting of a hunter than to going into town for groceries. Finely tooled outsider fiction, as chilling as it is ultimately humane.


Bornholm Night-Ferry, by Aidan Higgins. Dalkey Archive Press

Higgins records a passionate, doomed epistolary love affair between Elin Marstrander, a 33-year-old radio writer and Finn "Fitz" Fitzgerald, a man 15 years her senior. The novel tracks five years of the lovers' correspondence, following the first time they meet on holiday in Spain in 1975. This haunting meditation on love and textuality will be much appreciated. Aidan Higgins is part of a rich history of Irish writers, and is often mentioned as a successor to such great Irish writers of the twentieth century as Frank O'Connor, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Brian O Nualláin. (Literature Resource Centre).

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