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Irish Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Vona Groarke: ‘The best thing that could happen for Irish poetry is for people to buy poetry books'
Earlier this month, Vona Groarke became the 10th poet in a distinguished line to be named the Ireland Professor of Poetry. At the age of 60, Groarke is ready for a new challenge. She is finishing up her time as writer in residence at the prestigious St John's College, Cambridge, and her children are grown up. 'Suddenly the adrenaline has kicked in,' she smiles. 'Also a sense that I'm not going to live forever and whatever work I want to do, I ought to just do.' The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust was set up in 1998 to celebrate Seamus Heaney following his Nobel Prize win, and every three years since, a poet of honour and distinction is chosen to represent the chair. Previous professors include Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill , Paul Durcan and, most recently, Paul Muldoon . Groarke describes Muldoon as a tough act to follow. She's an admirer of what he achieved during his time as professor of poetry, particularly his seminar series How To Read A Poem, which offered the reading public strategies for accessing contemporary poetry. 'It was a really clever way of not dumbing down poetry but also bringing people in.' READ MORE Groarke may be a more understated presence than the rock star poet Muldoon, but she is looking forward to bringing something fresh to the role when she begins this September. Her work speaks for itself. Over the past 30 years she has written 15 books, including nine collections of poetry, a book-long essay and her brilliant book Hereafter, a complex dialogue with her late grandmother's life as an immigrant in New York, which Groarke wrote during her time as Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. One thing she will not be doing during her tenure as professor of poetry is force-feeding the nation poetry. 'I notice in England there's this idea of 'bringing poetry to the people' and I need to put asterisks around that idea because I think, yeah, if they want it . We're not in the business of ramming poetry down anybody's throats so if we invite them and they accept the invitation, then that's wonderful. If they don't want to accept the invitation, then we shouldn't consider that a failure. People are interested in different things. And also, if we try too hard to interest people who don't want to be interested in it, you end up sometimes compromising the art form and emphasising things other than the aesthetic element of it. I think in Ireland we're pretty good at not doing that but we need to be a little vigilant around that area, to respect the craft, to respect the aesthetic, to respect that it is an art form and it's not for everybody.' She is very much a believer in poetry as an art form first and foremost. 'There is a fashion for talking about the social application of poetry – poetry as a force for change, poetry as a force for expressing anger, a protest – and it can be those things, but we mustn't lose sight of the fact that it is also an art form and it has elements of craft and aesthetic and we lose something if we lose sight of those.' How does she feel about becoming something more of a household name as the professor of poetry? 'I feel slightly ambivalent about it,' she laughs, 'because I live alone at the base of a mountain in the countryside and I cherish that. I like the retreat aspect of my life.' Groarke was always going to be a writer. 'I think I figured out early on in life that imagination is the most important and least valued aspect of human existence.' The youngest of six children, she grew up on a farm in Ballymahon, Co Longford. She describes herself as a bit of a swot in school and even though she considered studying law (her father ran a legal practice in Longford town and four of her five siblings went into the family profession) she says it was always going to be English in Trinity for her. 'I think I just knew that I was more interested in this than I was in anything else.' Poet Vona Groarke: 'If you give [someone] a novel, it's just one world; if you give a poetry book, you give a multiplicity of worlds.' Photograph: Joe O'Shaughnessy She went to boarding school for three years in Our Lady's Bower, Athlone, before moving to Galway where she did her Leaving Cert at Taylor's Hill secondary school. During this time she lived with her older sister who was married with her own young family. 'I had never held a baby, never played with a toddler, I'd never done any of those things so it was an absolute joy for me to be living there. ' For people who are unfamiliar with her work, she is most often compared to Elizabeth Bishop and she describes herself as slightly more in the Borodin school than the Woody Guthrie school of poetry. She is known for her rigour of form, precision of language and complexity of feeling. She didn't write poetry while she was studying at Trinity, despite a lively scene there. 'When you're reading Wordsworth, Yeats and Shelley they seem to be sculpted in Carrara marble. They don't seem like something you can have a go at yourself.' It wasn't until after she had left college and attended a poetry workshop with Eavan Boland that she found the impetus she needed to begin to write. It's also where she met the poet Conor O'Callaghan. 'We went on to get married and to have two children. We're not still married, but that was very formative. It just seemed like that became a kind of a world, like we were living in poetry.' It was romantic but not easy earning a living as poets in the beginning. She has taught poetry at the University of Manchester since 2007 but sees the creative writing industry as something of a double-edged sword. 'When the creative writing trade kicked in, everybody became involved in that because it was a job that you could do part-time and that would leave you room to do other things and there was something appealing about working in a university and having colleagues and having a pension. I couldn't have managed without it, really, but I wonder if it squeezed our pool of experience slightly. We all have the same jobs, we all do the same work, none of us are farmers or hairdressers or whatever ... It was fantastic, but I think there was a little cost to that in terms of the art form.' [ Garry Hynes: 'My wife was taken from me in the blink of an eye. My whole life's changed' Opens in new window ] She thinks it's a little different in Ireland, where institutions such as Aosdána , of which she is a member, and the Arts Council and even the recently piloted basic income scheme for artists all offer an alternative means of financial support for writers. She thinks Irish poetry is in good health but worries a little about poets being tempted away by the bright lights of novel writing. One of the issues, she thinks, is agents (Groarke has never had one) encouraging poets to expand into other forms. Another is big poetry prizes being awarded to debut collections. 'I think it's actually really bad for the profession and for the poets themselves, because if you've won the TS Eliot Prize with your first book, I'm not saying you only write for prizes, but if you've already achieved what most of us spend careers trying to get on the shortlist for, then it does kind of make you feel like, where do I go next? What's next?' So what makes a good poem in her opinion? 'There has to be, I think, an element of sincerity or the poem misses something. I think the element of sincerity might be the pulse of the poem, and you have to find it somewhere but it may not always be on the surface. I think that the ability in a poem to think and feel coterminously ... it needs to be doing both, not to the same extent or in equal measures, but if those elements are missing then it's probably going to be a limp enough piece of writing.' [ New Laureate for fiction Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: 'I was part of a movement of women writers of Ireland' Opens in new window ] If there was one simple thing that she thinks could invigorate Irish poetry, what might that be? 'The best thing that could happen for Irish poetry is for people to buy poetry books. If you give [someone] a novel, it's just one world; if you give a poetry book, you give a multiplicity of worlds.' Vona Groarke's latest collection, Infinity Pool, is published by Gallery Press
Irish Times
15-07-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Tuam is a microcosm for Ireland's history of discarded bones
Ireland often seems surreal. But it is also, if I may be permitted to coin a word, subreal. We share the island, not just with what is above ground but what it under it. Our reality is not just experienced – it is exhumed. As Seamus Heaney put it in Bogland, it keeps 'striking/ Inwards and downwards,/ Every layer they strip/Seems camped on before'. The subsoil of the grounds of the former Bons Secours Mother and Baby home in Tuam is described as a 'yellow-grey silty gritty layer'. And it is being stripped now , down to where, between 1925 and 1961, perhaps 796 tiny human beings were stuffed in a disused sewage system. This non-resting place is, as the technical report published in 2017 has it, 'an elongated structure, comprising 20 chambers, with juvenile human remains identified in 17 of those chambers'. These chambers of horror are 'deep and narrow'. Indeed – this is a kind of reality that has been buried very deep and confined to a very narrow strip of Irish consciousness. It is weirdly apt that Tuam in its original form is Tuaim, a tumulus or burial mound. It has become a microcosm for all that has been interred with Irish history's discarded bones. In the grounds of the home, there are many layers of yellow-grey oblivion. There have been, in modern times, three distinct cycles of shameful burial and exhumation just in this small patch of Irish earth. READ MORE Family members of children believed to be buried at the former mother and baby institution in Tuam have spoken to the media ahead of the excavation of the site Before it was the Mother and Baby home, the complex was the Tuam workhouse. It opened in 1846, which meant that it was immediately overwhelmed by desperate victims of the Great Famine who died, not just of disease and hunger, but as Eavan Boland put it in her poem Quarantine, 'Of the toxins of a whole history.' They were initially buried just beside the workhouse, until the authorities objected that the 'burying ground ... is in such a state as to be injurious to the health of the occupiers of premises in ... the entire town of Tuam'. [ Tuam families can see 'light at the end of a very long tunnel' Opens in new window ] In 2012, during works on the town water scheme, 18 pits containing 48 bodies of famine victims were uncovered. It seems probable that many more bodies lie in and around the grounds. Interestingly, even in the midst of that unspeakable catastrophe, these people had at least been buried in coffins – a dignity not afforded to the children who later died in the care of the nuns. The second episode of burial and exhumation on this same patch of land occurred during and immediately after the Civil War. Between its periods as a workhouse and a Mother and Baby home, the Tuam complex had another brief life that also involved hidden burials. It was occupied during the Civil War by the Free State Army. In March 1923, six anti-Treaty prisoners were executed in the workhouse and buried in the grounds. In May, two more prisoners suffered the same fate. These bodies were exhumed and reburied in 1924. It again seems interesting that these dead men were given a memorial on the site: there is a commemorative plaque on the only preserved section of the wall of the Mother and Baby home. The famine and the Troubles at least occupied enough space in official memory for coffins and commemorations to be afforded to their victims. The children who died in the Mother and Baby home were not part of history until the extraordinary Catherine Corless made them so – thus they got neither coffins nor memorials. The operation to identify so many now-jumbled bones of infants using DNA analysis and other cutting-edge techniques will, if successful, set a new benchmark for the rescue of the unwanted dead from the contempt of silence and anonymity What makes the forensic excavation that began in Tuam yesterday even stranger is that it fuses an old Ireland with a new. It is both deeply atavistic and startlingly innovative. It is something that seems never to have happened before in human history. There have been thousands of archaeological explorations of tombs and burial chambers. There have been numerous grim excavations of bodies dumped in mass graves after massacres or battles. (Daniel MacSweeney, who is heading the Tuam operation, gained his expertise in the Lebanon and the Caucasus. Oran Finegan, its leading forensic scientist, worked on 'large-scale post conflict identification programmes' in the Balkans and Cyprus.) There are also many cases of babies and other inmates being buried in unmarked or poorly recorded graves on the grounds of institutions – at, for example, the Smyllum Park boarding home in Scotland , the Haut de la Garenne boarding home on Jersey , the Ballarat Orphanage in Australia, and the Duplessis Orphans' home in Canada . Here in Ireland, we had the hideous exhumation in 1993 of the graves of women buried at the High Park Magdalene home in Dublin – so that the nuns could sell the land for property development. But the situation of the remains in Tuam – neither a grave nor a tomb – has, according to the technical group, 'no national or international comparisons that the group is aware of'. And the operation to identify so many now-jumbled bones of infants using DNA analysis and other cutting-edge techniques will, if successful, set a new benchmark for the rescue of the unwanted dead from the contempt of silence and anonymity. This is making history in a double sense – doing something that has never been done before while simultaneously reshaping a country's understanding of its own recent past. [ Tuam mother and baby home: 80 people come forward to give DNA to identify buried children Opens in new window ] And, hopefully, of its present. The digging up of the bodies of people disappeared by the IRA has helped us to grasp the truth that the Troubles themselves cannot simply be buried. Revenants like Jean McConville return, not just to remind us of the past but to warn us of what it means when people become, even after death, disposable. While the Tuam excavation continues, we have, in the corner of our eyes, a peripheral awareness of the undead. Since they were not allowed properly to rest in peace, we cannot do so either. Since they were so contemptuously consigned to oblivion, we are obliged to remember. Since they were sacrificed to a monolithic tunnel vision, we must tunnel down to bring buried truths to light and hidden histories to consciousness.
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn review
The literature of the Troubles is a rich one, from Seamus Heaney's North (1975), Jennifer Johnston's Shadows on Our Skin (1977) and Bernard MacLaverty's Cal (1983), to Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man (1994), Anna Burns's Booker-winning Milkman (2018), and Louise Kennedy's Trespasses (2022). The latest addition to the corpus, a slim debut story collection by nonbinary Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn, shares the brilliance and burning energy of those other books, but there is a fundamental distinction. Ní Chuinn was born in the year of the Good Friday agreement, the 1998 power-sharing deal that delivered peace and brought an end to the Troubles; why, then, should their writing be so obsessed with them? 'I believe, these things, they're the making of us,' a character says at one point. He's talking about a dead friend, but his words might apply to Northern Ireland's past 50 or so years. Throughout the book the violence of that period is shown to persist, the past proving powerfully, inconveniently alive. Tensions flare between those who attempt to ignore that fact and others who insist on it. The narrator of the title story, Jackie, sometimes uses slashes to prevent him having to choose between alternative nouns: 'It looks like a morgue/a nightmare and it smells like a butcher's but with chemicals mixed in.' Ní Chuinn's writing is often terse, blunt, its subject matter better served by urgency than elegance. Jackie is a young man haunted by the internment, before his birth, of his uncle and grandfather – also Jackie – and by loyalists having hijacked his parents' car when his mother was pregnant with him. When Jackie was a boy his father fell ill and appeared to enter a vegetative state. Ní Chuinn, a writer of subtlety despite the polemic that veins these stories, doesn't push hard on the metaphor, but this 'lax and unmoving' figure can be read as a symbol for a Northern Ireland that forgets its history. In fact, as another character – born, like Jackie, after the Good Friday agreement – insists later on, in Northern Ireland the past bears down on the present with such weight that it is an error to even call it history. Ní Chuinn forgoes an epigraph, but a lesser writer, one more in need of underlining their aims, would have reached for Faulkner's lines from Requiem for a Nun: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' There is space, though, for other concerns and registers. Novena features Moll, second-generation Irish with a father from East Timor. Her grandmother, who is literally keeping the faith, texts Moll: 'Said special prayer. You should feel it in couple mins.' But the church she attends announces the impossibility of single funerals owing to a lack of priests, and its congregants listen to hymns on CD because 'there is no choir'. In the story Russia, which centres on a brother and sister adopted from that country, a psychic asks her client why he's come. Aren't you supposed to know? he answers. 'The psychic says: Everyone, no word of a lie, every single person says that. You've, none of youse, you've no concept of how this works.' Ní Chuinn's humour flashes brighter for its infrequent use. The same story describes a series of anonymous protests at a museum. Flowers of remembrance are being left at exhibits containing human remains: the preserved corpse of an ancient Egyptian, a Viking skull, a stone age woman's bones. This broadens the book's preoccupation with the past while simultaneously, in the manner of Heaney's bog poems, linking ancient instances of violence with the sectarian murders committed within living memory. Not everyone is willing to have such connections pointed out. In the closing story, Daisy Hill, a young man's obsession with the Troubles exasperates his family. 'I'm sick of this, right, Rowan?' his cousin Shane says. 'It happened, right? It happened, two sides, either side, both, it happened, it stopped.' Rowan rejects not only the urge to leave the past behind, but Shane's characterisation: 'I hate that, says Rowan. It's not both sides, it's not either side, it's this huge fucking army, it's this huge fucking state, this government that does whatever it wants, that just, that, they can kill us, and kill us.' Reading this book as the Israeli state kills unprecedented numbers of Palestinian civilians in Gaza feels particularly difficult, but also valuable – or as valuable as reading can be in the circumstances. Ní Chuinn's stories are unpredictable and memorable. While they contain the stuff of plots – family secrets, abuse, fraudulent fertility clinics and human trafficking – these aren't their true subjects, and they almost entirely lack the resolution provided by that familiar short-story trait, the epiphany. Rather than accounts of revelation, these are reports from the knotty midst of things. They describe entanglements that cannot be ignored or consigned to history. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Daisy Hill ends with a threnody subtitled The Truth, nine pages detailing more than 50 murders of Northern Irish civilians by British soldiers. Ní Chuinn quotes a Conservative government minister's contemporary praise for the impartiality and professionalism with which British soldiers performed their duties. 'The British state,' Ní Chuinn writes, correcting the record, 'kills and it kills and it kills and it kills.' This extraordinary book's final words – 'nobody is ever charged' – jam open the door to a past many would prefer to remain shut away. Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Irish Times
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
West Cork Chamber Music Festival 2025 review: Wonderful performances at an event that's as healthy as ever
West Cork Chamber Music Festival Bantry, Co Cork ★★★★☆ It was back in 1996 that the first West Cork Chamber Music Festival took place. Many of the now familiar features from its 30th iteration were present from the start. The 14 concerts at Bantry House were given by multiple string quartets (the RTÉ Vanbrugh and Quatuor Parisii) and multiple pianists (Philippe Cassard and Barry Douglas), who mixed and matched with another half-dozen performers for what you might call bespoke ensembles working together for the first time. Poetry was not just sung but also spoken by poets. Michael Hartnett read his Mountains, Fall on Us in Haydn's Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, Seamus Heaney read his Squarings with Bach's Sixth Solo Cello Suite. There were works by living composers: John Tavener's The Hidden Treasure and To a Child Dancing in the Wind, Robert Simpson's String Quartet No 7, and the premiere of Jane O'Leary's Mystic Play of Shadows. There were masterclasses, though none dealt with string quartets, as most of them do now, and a choral concert in Schull. READ MORE Choral music hasn't featured much since then, though outreach programmes now bring music far from Bantry, and include visits to Bere, Whiddy, Sherkin and Hare Islands, as well to Cork Airport. This year's festival, which ended on Sunday, even has repertoire overlaps with the first: Debussy's String Quartet, Bach's Sixth Solo Cello Suite, Haydn's Seven Last Words and Brahms's Piano Quintet, with Barry Douglas at the piano, just as in 1996. [ West Cork Chamber Music Festival 2024 review: Mesmerising Schubert, achingly beautiful Beethoven and lovely Smetana Opens in new window ] The most striking changes between then and now are ones of scale. Three other spaces have been called into service as concert venues. This year's programme lists 57 concerts and 29 masterclasses, and outreach events now exceed the total number of concerts given in the first festival. Scale comes into changes in performing style over the past three decades, too. Take the youthful octet for strings completed in 1900 by Romania's greatest composer, George Enescu, when he was just shy of 19. I haven't been able to trace an Irish performance of this exuberant work before the festival programmed it in 2003. An even younger composer, Felix Mendelssohn, wrote what's still the greatest octet at an even younger age (16), and wrote that the work 'must be played by all the instruments in symphonic orchestral style'. Enescu took his cue from the kind of sonority that Mendelssohn had in mind, and wrote music that is even richer, more complex, often like a sonic tapestry that is so dense it can hardly be fully absorbed in real time. This year's supercharged, let-it-all-hang-out performance by the combined Marmen and Doric Quartets winds it up a notch or three in drive and intensity. There is never a risk of it sounding other than orchestral. It's a white-knuckle ride, tremendously exciting but at the same time having, for the listener, something of the quality of trying to take in a gorgeous landscape while being blinded by the sun. West Cork Chamber Music Festival 2025: Marmen Quartet. Photograph: Marco Borggreve West Cork Chamber Music Festival 2025: Chiaroscuro Quartet. Photograph: Joss McKinley The Chiaroscuro Quartet , led by Alina Ibragimova, have long made high drama and sharp contrasts a feature of their playing. The middle ground suffers, not because they don't do it well but because they're apt to spend so little time there. Their success depends on a kind of suspension of disbelief, and when that works they're often second to none. This year it works in Haydn's Seven Last Words. In this extraordinary set of seven slow movements, which takes more than an hour to perform, their gutsy and searing but also often intimate playing is interleaved with poems commissioned from Paula Meehan. Her calm, slightly lilting delivery potentiates the impact of her messages about contemporary issues we all know of but would rather not have to dwell on. It's easy to imagine that, religious as he was, Haydn would have preferred the concentrated compassion of her words over the homilies given by the bishop of Cádiz at the first performance, in 1787. The Chiaroscuro Quartet concentrate on Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, but the most impressive performances in this repertoire that I hear at this year's festival comes from the Tchalik Quartet , for their sheer loveliness in the slow movement from Mozart's Hunt Quartet and their almost old-fashioned savoir-faire in Beethoven's Quartet in B flat, Op 130, and the Marmen Quartet , who bring a somewhat similar perspective to Haydn's Quartet in D, Op 33 No 6, and Mozart's Dissonance Quartet. They use an exceptionally well-stocked arsenal of tonal and timbral wizardry, the kind of technical finesse that was not around much in the musical world of the late 20th century. The range of their stylistic affinity also extends to the altogether different warmth and glow of two very different French quartets, those of Debussy and Ravel. West Cork Chamber Music Festival 2025: Tchalik Quartet. Photograph: Alex Kostromin Quatuor Ardeo , among the stars of the 2023 festival, are in less good form this year. They set the bar high, and a more disciplined and tightly wound approach to music-making than theirs is hard to imagine. This time around they offer an unusual performance of Janacek's Second String Quartet (Intimate Letters), a work the composer wrote in the throes of his unrequited passion for a much younger married woman, and which he originally planned to feature a viola d'amore rather than a regular viola. The viola d'amore is a baroque instrument that has a set of sympathetic strings that vibrate freely and add a kind of haze or halo to its sound. Janacek, it seems, was as much interested in the amore as in the sound. It's fascinating to hear the original conception, but, though it's no fault of the players, the viola d'amore can't really match up to the stronger tone of the other instruments, apart from the delicate fading of the sympathetic strings that can be heard during silences. The Ardeo also offer a performance of Bach's Art of Fugue that aims so high in purity that it feels rather too much like an ascetic ritual. [ 'It was clear I wanted to play first violin. When you are leader you can really create energy' Opens in new window ] The best of this year's new works, When You Think You're Looking, setting words by Jessica Traynor , comes from Deirdre Gribbin . It's for soprano (Lucy Fitz Gibbon) and string quartet (the Marmen again) and is a follow-on from last year's Magdalene Songs project, for which Gribbin set Traynor's An Education in Silence. The story of the inhumanity of the Magdalene laundries, in full view but not seen for so many years, is clearly not going away. The new work sets six first-person narratives, again by Traynor, Fitz Gibbon delivering the words with intensity, the four strings providing vivid scene setting and responses. It's an exploration of the experience of displacement and incarceration. It fleshes out in sound a world that would once have been treated as cases into the feelings of real people suffering the consequences of oppression. It's one of those pieces that are much more than the sum of their parts. The German-Irish cellist Nuala McKenna makes her festival debut in Britten's First Suite for solo cello (the first work the composer wrote for the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich) and Bach's Sixth Suite. Musically, solo-cello music often sounds a little unwieldy in performance, with a lot of rhythmic adjustments effected by choosing notes to linger on expressively. It's an alternative to dynamic shaping, and you could regard it as the musical equivalent of driving out into the middle of the road to turn a corner. McKenna shows a kind of discipline that enables her to turn musical corners cleanly, and the result is a hugely refreshing reworking of performing patterns that have been established since the advent of sound recording. Even better than her Bach is the Britten Suite, which, to use an analogy often invoked in the world of historically informed performances, sounds like the musical equivalent of removing layers of varnish from a great painting. West Cork Chamber Music Festival 2025: Lotte Betts-Dean. Photograph: Matthew Johnson Other wonderful performances come from the Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean (in a programme with her father, the viola-playing composer Brett Dean), Barry Douglas (in Listz's B minor Sonata and Brahms's Piano Quintet – the Marmen, yet again), the baroque violinist Rachel Podger (perhaps coming across as a touch ditsy in speaking to the audience, sharp as a tack in her playing) and the final work of the festival, Tchaikovsky's exuberant Souvenir de Florence string sextet, performed by the father and daughter Henning and Alma Serafin Kraggerud on violin, Emma Wernig and Séamus Hickey on viola, and Ella van Poucke and Christopher Marwood on cello. Clearly, chamber music in west Cork is as healthy as ever.
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn review
The literature of the Troubles is a rich one, from Seamus Heaney's North (1975), Jennifer Johnston's Shadows on Our Skin (1977) and Bernard MacLaverty's Cal (1983), to Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man (1994), Anna Burns's Booker-winning Milkman (2018), and Louise Kennedy's Trespasses (2022). The latest addition to the corpus, a slim debut story collection by nonbinary Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn, shares the brilliance and burning energy of those other books, but there is a fundamental distinction. Ní Chuinn was born in the year of the Good Friday agreement, the 1998 power-sharing deal that delivered peace and brought an end to the Troubles; why, then, should their writing be so obsessed with them? 'I believe, these things, they're the making of us,' a character says at one point. He's talking about a dead friend, but his words might apply to Northern Ireland's past 50 or so years. Throughout the book the violence of that period is shown to persist, the past proving powerfully, inconveniently alive. Tensions flare between those who attempt to ignore that fact and others who insist on it. The narrator of the title story, Jackie, sometimes uses slashes to prevent him having to choose between alternative nouns: 'It looks like a morgue/a nightmare and it smells like a butcher's but with chemicals mixed in.' Ní Chuinn's writing is often terse, blunt, its subject matter better served by urgency than elegance. Jackie is a young man haunted by the internment, before his birth, of his uncle and grandfather – also Jackie – and by loyalists having hijacked his parents' car when his mother was pregnant with him. When Jackie was a boy his father fell ill and appeared to enter a vegetative state. Ní Chuinn, a writer of subtlety despite the polemic that veins these stories, doesn't push hard on the metaphor, but this 'lax and unmoving' figure can be read as a symbol for a Northern Ireland that forgets its history. In fact, as another character – born, like Jackie, after the Good Friday agreement – insists later on, in Northern Ireland the past bears down on the present with such weight that it is an error to even call it history. Ní Chuinn forgoes an epigraph, but a lesser writer, one more in need of underlining their aims, would have reached for Faulkner's lines from Requiem for a Nun: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' There is space, though, for other concerns and registers. Novena features Moll, second-generation Irish with a father from East Timor. Her grandmother, who is literally keeping the faith, texts Moll: 'Said special prayer. You should feel it in couple mins.' But the church she attends announces the impossibility of single funerals owing to a lack of priests, and its congregants listen to hymns on CD because 'there is no choir'. In the story Russia, which centres on a brother and sister adopted from that country, a psychic asks her client why he's come. Aren't you supposed to know? he answers. 'The psychic says: Everyone, no word of a lie, every single person says that. You've, none of youse, you've no concept of how this works.' Ní Chuinn's humour flashes brighter for its infrequent use. The same story describes a series of anonymous protests at a museum. Flowers of remembrance are being left at exhibits containing human remains: the preserved corpse of an ancient Egyptian, a Viking skull, a stone age woman's bones. This broadens the book's preoccupation with the past while simultaneously, in the manner of Heaney's bog poems, linking ancient instances of violence with the sectarian murders committed within living memory. Not everyone is willing to have such connections pointed out. In the closing story, Daisy Hill, a young man's obsession with the Troubles exasperates his family. 'I'm sick of this, right, Rowan?' his cousin Shane says. 'It happened, right? It happened, two sides, either side, both, it happened, it stopped.' Rowan rejects not only the urge to leave the past behind, but Shane's characterisation: 'I hate that, says Rowan. It's not both sides, it's not either side, it's this huge fucking army, it's this huge fucking state, this government that does whatever it wants, that just, that, they can kill us, and kill us.' Reading this book as the Israeli state kills unprecedented numbers of Palestinian civilians in Gaza feels particularly difficult, but also valuable – or as valuable as reading can be in the circumstances. Ní Chuinn's stories are unpredictable and memorable. While they contain the stuff of plots – family secrets, abuse, fraudulent fertility clinics and human trafficking – these aren't their true subjects, and they almost entirely lack the resolution provided by that familiar short-story trait, the epiphany. Rather than accounts of revelation, these are reports from the knotty midst of things. They describe entanglements that cannot be ignored or consigned to history. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Daisy Hill ends with a threnody subtitled The Truth, nine pages detailing more than 50 murders of Northern Irish civilians by British soldiers. Ní Chuinn quotes a Conservative government minister's contemporary praise for the impartiality and professionalism with which British soldiers performed their duties. 'The British state,' Ní Chuinn writes, correcting the record, 'kills and it kills and it kills and it kills.' This extraordinary book's final words – 'nobody is ever charged' – jam open the door to a past many would prefer to remain shut away. Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
