MacNiece rejected the armchair activism of his contemporaries for a more wry take on the world that I responded to immediately when I read his poem, Bagpipe Music, It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,/Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension. More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 62 Desolation Row 1984

The American Sara Teasdale who composed clear, elegant verse wrote a poem entitled The Answer early in the 20th Century.  Again, you will have to search for the question, but it may be a tad uncomfortable, particularly if you are a male...More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 61 The Answer

But here I am, just before 6 o'clock am, on Sunday, April 25th, 2021, at the end of my driveway, observing the request of the organisers of Anzac Day not to gather in public, to mark the occasion- as we did in 2020. Why? Because COVID persists just about everywhere on this planet. More

Letters From Quotidia ANZAC Day Special 2021

I first heard this song from an early Dubliners LP in the late 1960s featuring the incomparable Luke Kelly on vocals. So, again, I here present a lockdown version featuring Band-in-a-Box etc.- which is great to have, but I would prefer having living, breathing musos behind me rather than the digital devices.More

Letters From Quotidia Postcards Edition 15

Spirited light! on the edge/of the Presence your yearning/burns in the secret darkness,/O angels, insatiably/into God's gaze./Perversity/could not touch your beauty;/you are essential joy./But your lost companion,/angel of the crooked/wings- he sought the summit,/shot down the depths of God/and plummeted past Adam -/that a mud-bound spirit might soar. More

Letters From Quotidia Episode 60a Come Back an Angel

...the validity of a Eucharist celebrated at a school camp high up an escarpment in North Queensland in the early 1990s, by a parish priest confronted with a mixed bag of Catholics and non-Catholics who were invited to share the Paschal sacrifice with leavened bread and wine in clay-ware containers. More

Letters From Quotidia Where's the Harm?

It’s hard to live comfortably with this beneficence after viewing online a still photograph of a mother and child in Syria standing in front of a ruined streetscape in a village near the Turkish border, liberated from Islamic State. More

Letters From Quotidia Open Season

William Holman-Hunt, painted the lady entangled in her magic tapestry’s web as Sir Lancelot passes by outside singing Tirra Lirra. The Awakening Conscience, painted fifty years before, makes for an interesting comparison; there, too, is a mirror, a window and a beautiful woman depicted, but here, she’s on her lover’s lap as she gazes, transfixed out of the window. More

Letters From Quotidia Universe of Blue

McClory: Another immigrant song. Written by Pete St John about three interwoven strands of recent Irish history: the need to leave Ireland to find work, sectarianism and how friendship can overcome religious differences.More

Letters From Quotidia Postcards Edition 14

Banjo Paterson knew all about the nature of time and its murky depths: All of us play our very best game/Any other time./ Golf or billiards, it’s all the same,/ Any other time./  Lose a match and you always say,/ “Just my luck! I was ‘off’ to-day!/ I could have beaten him quite half-way,/ Any other time!” More

Letters From Quotidia Somewhere Along the Line