Limerick poet John Liddy launches latest work in Spanish capital

THE LIMERICK literary organisation the Limerick Writers’ Centre was invited to present at a gathering at the Ateneo de Madrid the latest book of poems, Arias of Consulation, by Limerick poet John Liddy.

The Director of the Limerick Writers’ Centre Dominic Taylor and UL’s Professor Eoin Devereux made the trip to Madrid to participate in the event at the Ateneo, one of Spain’s most prestigious cultural institutions.

Speaking at the occasion Dominic Taylor explained to the invited audience the origins of the Limerick Writers’ Centre saying “it began as a result of Barney Sheehan’s White House Poetry Revival reading series in 2003. What he began I continued until poetry in Limerick became an ‘unstoppable flow’.”

Describing The Limerick Writers’ Centre, as a ‘place to inspire and be inspired’, he said their mission has always been to be a strong voice for contemporary literature, based on democracy of opportunity, the community and a participatory co-operative culture.

“We encourage writers – from the serious career minded to people who write for pleasure, healing, personal growth, insight, or just to inform. And over the years we have produced a broad range of writing, including poetry, history, memoir and general prose," he continued.

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He has described John Liddy’s Arias of Consultation as “a complex act of memory which gives life to our past".

It is a commemoration of Limerick’s past, providing us with a new way of looking at ourselves.

"In the book Irish Poetry After Joyce, the author Dillon Johnson, says that ‘There is a connection between the place and the language it nurtures’ and I believe that John Liddy has used his connections with Limerick – historical, social, cultural – and by using in many parts of this poem the vernacular of Limerick, the place names and names of people – in wonderful terza rimma – deepens this connection inviting us, using the aesthetic language of poetry, to see the place as if for the first time. Combined with the drawings of Limerick artist John Shinnors he touches on and weaves, questions of identity, belonging and home, transforming them and us in the process," he said.

He concluded by saying “I believe that Liddy has captured the essential detail of Limerick in this work. We all know about Joyce’s Dublin, Zola’s Paris, Yeats’s Sligo, Heaney’s Mossbawn…I think we can now rightly refer to Liddy’s Limerick.”

By the end of the night, a woman, Sara Medina, arrived late with a book in hand and she explained that she was a student of John Liddy's when he first arrived in Spain.

She was sorry she could not make the event earlier but presumed that a group of Irish writers might still be found, drinking and talking in the theatre's bar.

She was right. John Liddy had inspired her with Joyce and poetry all those years ago and she presented him with a poetry book of her own, that she wrote in 2015, called Como arderá la niebla.

It turns out that even in Spain where the students speak English as a second language, there is a ‘a community of unstoppable flow.'