“The Word in Flames” confirms Dave Lordan’s stature as the most original, incendiary and impassioned voice writing in Ireland today. The combined lyricism and potency of his writing confronts the reader, forcing us, as all great writers do, to see the things we are unwilling or forbidden to know.
Dr. Sinéad Kennedy Department of English, Maynooth University
If you like polemic to be scalding, defiant, revolutionary and erotic, then you’ll relish this book. By turn erudite, poetic, auto-biographical and scholarly (often all of these at once), this is an important anthology of essays by Ireland’s only literary prophet. Beware, it will make you a disciple.
Conor Kostick, Author & lecturer.
Table of Contents
Introduction, by William Wall 7
The Word in Flames – Poetry & Politics 13
The Abyss Staring Back – Shock in Literature, Literature in Shock 28
Raising the Devil: The unspeakable fictions of Liam O’Flaherty 44
Experimental Populism: Paul Durcan and the Survival of Irish Poetry 52
The Trans-generation in the Irish Arts 75
New York Impossible 84
Wordsworth’s Black Jesus 95
Mining Proust 113
The Multimedia Revolution in Poetry 127
Lordan’s Lit 