Congratulations to you, Alison! Tom
>(Via UB Poetics)
>
>The waspish Mr Eagleton has an entertaining swipe at Irish reviewing
>policies in his New Statesman diary:
>
>http://www.newstatesman.com/200501310003
>
>It seems that I've been dropped as a book reviewer by the Irish Times for
>daring to criticise Seamus Heaney. He lent his bardic seal of approval to an
>unctuously self-congratulatory ceremony in Dublin some months ago, at which
>a handful of new members were triumphally admitted to the EU on second-class
>terms. The Phoenix Park was full of beaming, backslapping Irish political
>boyos; and army officers shouted orders in Irish, just to prove that the
>nation cherishes its unique identity at the very moment when it's busting a
>gut to look exactly like Switzerland. Meanwhile, the Gardai were beating up
>protesters outside. Irish writers haven't on the whole marched or spoken out
>on Iraq (they come to London for posh dinners, not demos), but they'll
>declaim poems celebrating a club that cripples the world's poor with its
>tariffs, because that's not political, you see.
>
>So I wrote a poem for the Irish Times 's literary pages satirising this
>grisly event, which they published, I suspect, only because they hadn't a
>clue what it was about. Once the penny dropped, all review copies and
>telephone calls ceased instantly. This is a splendid thing. In the old
>Ireland, you were censored for criticising the Virgin Mary. Now it's Seamus
>Heaney. That's progress.
>
>
>
>
>Alison Croggon
>
>Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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