Tina Giannoukos recently interviewed me on the Spoken Word program on Community Radio 3CR about my latest collection The Office of Literary Endeavours. You can listen to the interview on the Spoken Word website https://www.3cr.org.au/spoken-word/episode/mark-roberts-office-literary-endeavours or you can listen below:
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You can buy The Office of Literary Endeavours from 5 Islands Press
Easter means different things to different people. For many it a time for deep religious and spiritual contemplation, for others it represents a holiday and lots of chocolate. For the Irish Catholics on my mother’s side of my family it was a time of great solemnity, not just because of the Christian celebration of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, but because it was the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland.
In my poem ‘Returns’, which appears in my new collection The Office of Literary Endeavours (5 Islands Press), I write of my return to Ireland, over 150 years after my great grandmother was forced to flee with her family. In the final part of the poem ‘Dublin GPO’ I remember my grandfather. While he never saw Ireland, he grew up with the stories of Irish resistance and the memory of hearing about the Easter Uprising and it’s aftermath stayed with him all his life. Before I read the history of Easter 1916 in books I had already heard his version of events numerous times.
The Office of Literary Endeavours is available from https://www.5islandspress.com/product-page/the-office-of-literary-endeavours-by-mark-roberts
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Things are getting real. I’ve signed the contract for my third collection, The Office of Literary Endeavours, with 5 Islands Press and, this weekend, I will be going through the final edits. While most of the poems in the collection have been published in various magazines, journals and anthologies over the past decade or so it will be great to see them together in a single collection.
Stay tuned for release and launch dates!
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