Slimming for the Beach

Just about a year ago, Patrick Chap­man and I set up an exper­i­ment called Irish Lit­er­ary Revival. As we put it in our introduction,

This is where out-of-print and out-of-circulation Irish books are brought back into the world. Although our name is a pun, our inten­tions are serious.

Would that we both had more time to pro­mote the site, but there has been some really nice feed­back in the intererim, and none more so than from Rose­marie Row­ley, who con­tributed her poetry col­lec­tion The Sea of Afflic­tion. She tells me she has been invited to con­fer­ences as a result of her book’s pres­ence on ILR. Rose­marie, who has been an envi­ron­men­tal­ist for forty years, and was an eco-critic long before the term was invented, writes:

I sup­pose at the end of the day, none of us know what will hap­pen to our work once we put it out there…
…I was hon­oured to be part of a lit­er­ary con­fer­ence last year in Aus­tria which had as its theme “Water”. There is now a Euro­pean Asso­ci­a­tion for the Study of Lit­er­a­ture and the Envi­ron­ment (EASCLE). It is only when you meet oth­ers work­ing in the field that you become aware of the strength of your own work.

That’s one of the most grat­i­fy­ing things I’ve heard in a long time, and I’m delighted that ILR played some small role. As well as the Sea of Afflic­tion on ILR, you can read some of her work on Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Poetry Online.

Inci­den­tally, we’re in the process of test­ing how Irish Lit­er­ary Revival might work in Word­Press. It would make every­thing that much eas­ier. Watch this space.