A reading/discussion with Liam Carson, author of Call Mother a Lonely Field. Thursday, May 13th, 20 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin 2 @ 7.30p.m.
Wine will be served; admission is free and all are welcome.
Liam Carson’s Call Mother a Lonely Field, published by Hag’s Head Press, has been described as a memoir worthy to stand beside Fiche Bliain ag Fás (Twenty Years a Growing). It is a richly evocative story of an Irish-speaking Belfast childhood where the language is a tearmann or sanctuary, a repository of stories and a resource for the spirit.
The arrival of new languages in Ireland causes us to look anew at how language is a source of nourishment and stability. There are many thousands of Polish speakers among us and we hope to compare how language nourishes and enriches our experience.
The Irish Polish Society is dedicated to cultural exchange between Ireland and Poland and organizes readings, musical events, exhibitions etc to further mutual understanding. This unique cross-cultural event will start with a reading, accompanied by song and images, and will conclude with a discussion. Wine will be served; admission is free and all are welcome.
For information contact: Pat Quigley – patquig2002@yahoo.com
Phone: 085 7133106
www.irishpolishsociety.ie
PRAISE FOR CALL MOTHER A LONELY FIELD
A selection of the excellent reviews that Call Mother a Lonely Field by Liam Carson has received:
“Like the city he grew up in, Liam Carson’s memoir of life in Belfast winds like a tangled web of streets, dreams, cultures and philosophies, where very page, pavement and street corner offer another dab of colour to a fascinating picture” Michael Foley, Sunday Times“Liam Carson has written an evocative, and, at times, profoundly thoughtful and moving short memoir of his parents and growing up in west Belfast in the 1960s and 1970s… His mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s is described with a tenderness that is almost unbearable… Every mother should have a son like this—and indeed it is a lucky child who had parents like his. Liam Carson has done them both proud in this affectionate, haunting, highly readable and, at times, poetic memoir.”
—Maurice Hayes, Irish Independent
“Call Mother a Lonely Place is an immensely pleasurable book, and a valuable addition to the canon of Irish autobiography… What makes Call Mother a Lonely Field such an unusual and pleasing memoir is the feel of collage it achieves. Lots of family photographs and cartoons and period advertisements are reproduced and incorporated seamlessly into the written text… This is a small book, and a hauntingly simple one. Though similar to Hugo Hamilton’s wonderful The Speckled People in subject, its style is much closer to a Blasket Island memoir relocated to Belfast in that city’s most turbulent decades.”
—Conor O’Callaghan, The Irish Times
“The moral and cultural passion of these two extraordinary people [Carson’s parents] throbs through Liam Carson’s loving memoir. It throbs through Liam’s prose and the poetry of his brother Ciaran Carson. Call Mother a Lonely Field reminds us that beneath the barren landscape of Northern Ireland, Christianity and the Irish language run like deep rivers. Writers, like water diviners, can find fresh outlets for these healing waters. Liam Carson is such a diviner.”
—Eoghan Harris, Sunday Independent
“I love the scale of this book: small and intense. A jewel. Carson’s father’s word for alluring, beguiling, enchanting—meallacach—is exactly fit for the book. It’s in a class of its own.”
—Paula Meehan
“This beautifully written memoir lingers like a series of dreams”
—Tom Galvin, Evening Herald
“Liam Carson has written the most moving memoir… a lyrical prose poem about being one of the first generation of Belfast children to be actually raised – reluctantly at times – with Irish.”
—Pól Ó Muirí, IrishTimes.com