Unti recently Pat Boran regularly contributed reviews of poetry, fiction and non-fiction books by Irish and international writers to a number of newspapers and journals. As he is now more involved in broadcasting and editing this section of the web site is no longer kept up to date. The books under review are arranged alphabetically by author / editor.   And See That No Potato Falls: Patrick Kavanagh's Vegetable Love Delivered as the Keynote Address at the 2005 Patrick Kavanagh Weekend   REVIEWS Life at the Extremes, Frances Ashcroft. A fascinating look at how humankind has long been attracted to the dangers beyond the edge of the known. A Life in Sepia, Isabel Allende. A review of Allende's epic novel. Double Vision, Pat Barker. Impressive novel dealing with, among other things, post-traumatic stress disorder, love and the new realities of country living. Beloved Stranger, Clare Boylan. Little Brown. UK £16.99 HB. Affecting novel of family and the challenges presented by failing memory. So Forth, Joseph Brodsky. Hamish Hamilton. The Russian emigré's final verse collection. The Life of W B Yeats, Terence Brown. Gill and Macmillan. Brown's solid and insightful view of Yeats as magician and mystic. The Book of Nothing John D Barrow. Fascinating exploration of the concept of nothingness, as treated by mathematicians, poets, scientists and others. Youth, JM Coetzee's fascinating novel about emotional coldness. The Picador Book of Journeys. Robyn Davidson. Picador. £16 UK, HB. The Blind Stitch. Greg Delanty. Oxford Poets, Carcanet. £6.95 pb. (2001) The Tempest. Juan Manuel de Prada. Sceptre. A first thriller set in the Venetian art world. Words Alone. The Poet T S Eliot. Denis Donoghue. Yale. Multi-layered and challenging re-evaluation of the poems, woven around a kind of autobiography of reading. Dylan Thomas: The Biography (New Edition) by Paul Ferris. J M Dent. Excellent book on the man who, perhaps more than any other, has given us the unfortunate stereotype of the hard-drinking poet. Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son. Allen and Louis Ginsberg. Ed. Michael Schumacher. My Century. Gunter Grass. Faber and Faber. Through a hundred short fragments, Gunter Grass reviews the 20th century in a way that opens hearts as well as eyes. Too Far Afield, Gunter Grass. Faber and Faber. From the last decade of the 20th century, a massive exploration of the history of Germany itself. So It Goes, Eamon Grennan. Gallery Press. Poems from one of Ireland's finest. The Whole Hog, Aidan Higgins. Secker and Warburg. Third instalment of the sexually-charged adventures of Rory of the Hills, the thinly-disguised alterego of one of Ireland's master prose writers. By Heart: 101 Poems to Remember. Ed. Ted Hughes. Faber and Faber. Just what it says on the cover, plus a short but fascinating introduction by Hughes on memory itself. Alcestis, Ted Hughes. Faber and Faber. Among the last published works of the late Poet Laureate. Why Don't You Stop Talking. Jackie Kay. Short stories by the well-known poet and novelist. Martial Art. Brendan Kennelly. The Spanish-Roman poet speaks, tongue-in-cheek, in the voice of one of Ireland's best-loved writers. Poetry My Arse, Brendan Kennelly, Bloodaxe (£9.95 pb). Large collection of short verse featuring anti-poet Ace de Horner whose name suggests, at least to Irish readers, some flavour of the satire to follow. Glimpses. Brendan Kennelly. Bloodaxe. £8.95. (2001) All Summer. Claire Kilroy. Faber and Faber. First novel by talented Irish newcomer The Letters of Kingsley Amis. Edited by Zachary Leader. Harper Collins. Kingsley Amis's letters conceal as much as they reveal. It Ain't Necessarily So. Richard Lewontin. Granta Books. Collection of Richard Lewontin's marvellous essay-length science book reviews which originally appeared in a number of US journals. Ferocious Humanism. Ed. WJ McCormack. Dent. Highly readable anthology of Irish poetry, published in the UK, and with a particular eye for work not always warmly embraced in such publications. William Trevor: The Writer and His Work. Dolores MacKenna. New Island Books. The Irish fiction master and his work analysed. Later Auden, Edward Mendelson. Faber and Faber. Second volume of Mendelson's brilliant life and times of one of the greatest English language poets of the 20th century. Early Auden was the first. The Funeral Game. Noel Monahan. Salmon Publishing. Ireland. Company: A Chosen Life. John Montague. Duckworth. UK. Witty memoir of literary Dublin and Paris by major contemporary Irish poet. The Faber Book of Beasts, ed. Paul Muldoon. Faber and Faber. A predictably wide-ranging and irreverent anthology of animal crackers from a man who could make a wonderful anthology in his sleep. Looking in at Eden. Aidan Murphy. New Island. £6.99 pb. (2001) Impressive poetry collection with a haunted, urbal heart. Icarus Sees His Father Fly. John O'Donnell. Dedalus Press. Ireland. Fine collection by one of the highest-rated younger Irish poets. Gunpowder, Bernard O' Donoghue. Chatto and Windus. UK. Poems by a very fine UK-based Irish poet. Beautiful and occasionally unsettling evocations of a southern Irish childhood. Another Sky, Colm O'Gaora, Picador. A moving an economic novel from the young Irish writer. Personality, Andrew O'Hagan. The trouble fictional life of a (real life) Scottish singing sensation of the 1970s.. Lost Classics. Various Eds. Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding and Linda Spalding. Bloomsbury, UK £14.99 Verbale, Michele Ranchetti, Italian Cultural Institute. Precise and unflinching poems from a very fine Italian poet, little known in English. Handsome and very successful trilingual volume, Italian, English and Irish. Curfew and Other Stories. Sean O'Reilly. Faber and Faber. Highly impressive debut collection of short stories set against the background of the Northern Ireland 'troubles'. Set in Darkness. Ian Rankin. Orion. Rankin's latest Rebus mystery is a convincing portrait of Edinburgh embarking upon Independence. The Parts, Keith Ridgway. Hugely impressive novel of contemporary Dublin by one of the finest young Irish talents. The Age of Access, Jeremy Rifkin. Penguin Books. Rifkin's vision of a future without markets as we know them. On the Natural History of Destruction. W G Sebald. Penguin. By times harrowing and moving account of the virtual pulverization of so many German towns and cities in the last years of the Second World War. Siegfried Sassoon. John Stuart Roberts. The war poet brought to life. The Science of Secrecy. Simon Singh. Fourth Estate. Book of the TV series, in turn of the previous book, The Code Book. Highly readable account of the major episodes in the history code-making and -breaking. Beyond Bedlam: Poems Written out of Mental Distress. Ed. Ken Smith and Matthew Sweeney. Anvil Press Poetry. Anthology of writing from inside and around the psychiatric caring God is a Bullet. Boston Teran. Macmillan. Satanic thriller by first time novelist. A wonderful sense of place unfortunately does not make up for unconvincing characters. The Master. Colm Toibin. Picador Toibin's moving and unsettling novelised portrait of Henry James. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia Graeme Turner, Frances Bonner and P David Marshall. Cambridge University Press. No price given. The Amateur Marriage. Anne Tyler. Chatto & Windus. UK. Auto da Fay. Fay Weldon. Autobiography of one of the world's best-known feminist writers. Knowledge in the Blood. New and Selected Poems. Macdara Woods. Dedalus, £7.95 pb. (2001) Update of impressive Selected of five years previously; Irish poems with a strong voice and sense of time and place.   Poetry Picks of 2001 Poetry Picks of 2002   Other Articles An Interview with Michael Longley. Originally published in Books Ireland, 1995. Shadows and Apples. A personal introduction to Irish poetry, originally published in the Colby Quarterly, USA, December 1992.

WB Yeats Siegfrid Sassoon William Shakespeare Ted Hughes Seamus Heaney Eavan Boland Paula Meehan Stephen King WH Auden Harry Potter JR Rowling Maeve Binchy