Contributors:

Anne Enright
Hugo Hamilton
Paula Meehan
Bisi Adigun
Theo Dorgan
Ursula Rani Sarma
Dorothy Cross
Conor McPherson
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
Marina Carr
Barry McCrea
Mary O’Malley
Gerry Adams
Roddy Doyle
Alice Maher
Colm Tóibín
Paul Muldoon
Women Writers in the New Ireland Network
Seamus Heaney
Cathal Ó Searcaigh
Michael Longley
Eavan Boland

In the first decade of the new millennium, Jody Allen Randolph interviewed twenty-two leading Irish poets, artists, fiction writers and playwrights to create a record of how the makers of a culture saw their country as it moved into a new era. Her exploration was shadowed by intimations of unease; as economic collapse gathered pace, recurrent concerns gained a new urgency. What are Irish values? How have they changed? How do new cultural realities affect the old arts of language and image which have been so important in Irish tradition?

In journeys across political divides and between languages, from Seamus Heaney and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, deeply rooted in Irish inheritance,to African-Irish Joyce Akpotor; from Gerry Adams for whom ‘when our future is settled, we will agree on our history’, to the artist Dorothy Cross who brings an international perspective to her redefinitions of Irish imagery, Close to the Next Moment captures the conversations that are remaking a culture.

Cover image: Mark Garry, Element1: Being here (detail). Photograph © copyright the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, 2010. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist and the Kerlin Gallery.

Contents

Acknowledgements    
Preface    

Anne Enright (August 2008)    
Hugo Hamilton (August 2008)    
Paula Meehan (August 2008)    
Bisi Adigun (September 2008)    
Theo Dorgan (March 2009)    
Ursula Rani Sarma (March 2009)    
Dorothy Cross (June 2009)    
Conor McPherson (June 2009)    
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (June 2009)    
Marina Carr (July 2009)
Barry McCrea (July 2009)    
Mary O’Malley (July 2009)    
Gerry Adams (August 2009)    
Roddy Doyle (August 2009)    
Alice Maher (August 2009)    
Colm Tóibín (December 2009)    
Paul Muldoon (December 2009)    
Women Writers in the New Ireland Network
(December 2009)    
Seamus Heaney (January 2010)    
Cathal Ó Searcaigh (January 2010)    
Michael Longley (February 2010)    
Eavan Boland (February 2010)    

Index