Interspersed with cool black-and-white author photographs from Eamon Doyle, we get some long considered pieces, such as Kevin Barry’s 12-page appraisal of the city of Cork, entitled The Raingod’s Green, Dark as Passion. “If cities are sexed, as Jan Morris believes, then Cork is a male place, “writes the celebrated author of Beatlebone and City of Bohane.
Barry continues his musings on the Leeside city where he once lived and worked in this Spring 2016 edition of the magazine. “Personified further, I would cast him as low-sized, disputatious and stoutly built, a hard-to-knock-over type.” On it goes, an affectionately engaging portrayal which should do wonders for Cork tourism as Granta readers lap it up. Lucy Caldwell has a touching short story of love and longing in the wee North, and memories stirred into reverie by a Belfast Marriage Equality march.
It’s not all about prose and poetry, however, and My Last Day at Seventeen is a set of colour photographs taken in the Russell Heights estate in Cobh by one Doug DuBois. The first in the series shows a young brave who has scaled a lamppost and is perched defiantly atop, unlike the more demure – and indeed grounded – first communion girls who are also the photographer’s subjects.
In entirely different visual territory, Loyalists and Republicans are depicted in Stephen Dock’s sequence of black-and-white images from Belfast, taken at Milltown Cemetery, in Sandy Row, Ardoyne, Tiger’s Bay. There is one from Creggan, Derry, the iconic `Ireland Unfree shall Never Be At Peace’ banner graffiti, still to be seen in January 2015. Birte Kaufmann's colour photographs of Travellers are particularly engaging and seem to range wide among Traveller pursuits - a statue of the virgin and child is juxtaposed with the horse and feed bucket or nosebag, seen though the caravan window. A young man proudly stands with two greyhounds, a young girl prays devoutly at an ancient site of worship.
Sara Baume, Colin Barrett and Belinda McKeon are represented, as is Dónal Ryan with an extract from his forthcoming novel, All We Shall Know. Editor Sigrid Rausing points out that almost all of the contributors engage with `some inner dialogue about Irishness’, although the protagonist of Colm Tóibin’s story, A Visit to the Zoo is Henrich and the tale is set in Berlin. In sum, Granta magazine has dusted down the Irish shop window and put on a captivating display of native talent.
Paddy Kehoe
