Arts Tonight 31 October 2011: Patrick Galvin and Mary Johnson

On tonight’s programme, to mark the death of Mary Johnson, writer, teacher and co-founder with her husband Patrick Galvin, and others, of the Munster Literature Centre, we repeat our tribute to Patrick Galvin, Cork’s great poet, first broadcast in May 2011, and to which Mary herself contributed.

Galvin, author of the famous poem The Madwoman of Cork, published many collections of poetry: Heart of Grace (1959), Christ in London (1960), The Wood Burners (1973), Man on The Porch (1980), Folk Tales for the General (1989), The Death of Art O'Leary (1992), New and Selected Poems (1996). He also wrote the fictionalised memoirs Song for a Poor Boy, Song for a Raggy Boy and Song for a Fly Boy, plays including We Do it For Love and Nightfall to Belfast, and many ballads.

Our programme includes recordings of the poet himself reading Advice to a Poet and the Madwoman of Cork and, in a 1950s recording with Al Jeffery, singing the Parting Glass.

In studio, Vincent Woods is joined by Professor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin of the English Department, TCD, poet Thomas McCarthy, Dr Eva Urban who lectures in Drama in UCD, and Roy Heayberd, who worked with Patrick Galvin in his years at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast.

Christy Moore, who recorded Galvin’s song James Connolly for his album Prosperous, joins the discussion.

In Cork, Mary Johnson remembers meeting Patrick in Belfast in the 1970s; her encounter with his plays and then his poetry; her understanding of his early life and painful experiences in an industrial school as brought to life in Song for a Raggy Boy; and their life together.

We also hear from Michael D Higgins – now President Elect -- on Galvin's poetry. He reads Incident at Oviedo during part one, and, as a postscript to the programme -- appropriately -- Galvin's Message to the Editor.

* * * Coming up on the programme in future weeks, we discuss the Year of Craft with a visit to the National Craft Gallery and Rudolf Heltzel's gold and silversmithing workshop in Kilkenny; we report on and assess the Imagine Ireland project in the US, we broadcast our interview with Charles Dickens's biographer Claire Tomalin, recently recorded in Trinity College, Dublin, and a special programme on Oscar Wilde.

* * *Our programme on Open House and the architect Sam Stephenson, broadcast 4 October 2010, recently won a silver award at the PPI radio awards.

It features a reassessment of his public architecture, with architects Shane O'Toole, Sean O Laoire, Tony Reddy, and Dr Sandra O’Connell, curator of Open House, and Nathalie Weadick, director of the Irish Architecture Foundation, and Noel Comer, owner of the converted mews house Stephenson designed for himself at the age of 25 in 1958, show us around 31 Leeson Close, now a guesthouse.

You can hear that programme here: