Liberty Hall
Liberty Hall
by Michael O’Loughlin
With its complex layering of themes, this unique new work by one of Ireland’s finest and most innovative poets is as bold a statement as the building itself.
C-format paperback | ISBN: 9781848407978 | 128pp | Release Date: 30 April 2021
“Defeatedly urbane and joyously wry, Liberty Hall is evocative, bizarre and effortlessly expressive of the vast, unconscious of beauty, history and place that is pushing us through our lives. A masterful and moving collection that I will return to again and again.”
Michael O’Loughlin was seven years old when the Irish trade union movement replaced its headquarters, Liberty Hall – the starting point of the 1916 Rising – with Ireland’s first skyscraper. This bold, seventeen-storey Liberty Hall expressed an aspiration towards the modernity which its builders envisaged as the birthright of future generations. Since then, as one of Dublin’s most iconic buildings, Liberty Hall has cast a personal and political light on the lives of citizens passing below, and formed the backdrop to O’Loughlin’s earliest childhood memories.
In this remarkable new book – a highly original fusion of poetry, visual images and prose memoirs – Liberty Hall becomes both a real and imaginary space, a physical building and a state of mind in which to be free; a place where the boundaries between verbal and visual, poetry and prose, past and present, city and suburb, local and global, all become fluid.
It is a book of numerous journeys: the ritualised crossing of the Liffey from North to South and back again; travels around European cities; and into O’Loughlin’s own family history in the first difficult century of the Irish state. He explores the emotional weather through memory, cinema and architecture, arriving in the end at Liberty Hall.
With its complex layering of themes, this unique new work by one of Ireland’s finest and most innovative poets is as bold a statement as the building itself.
Praise for Liberty Hall:
“O’Loughlin remains refreshingly counter-lyrical to the dominant chord of pathos in much contemporary poetry... Liberty Hall is a welcome and brilliant addition to his work.”
“Liberty Hall shows that O’Loughlin remains a disruptive thinker, disinterring platitudes, labels and nationalities. He is a quizzical intellectual, equally at home and displaced in all cultures. This allows him to write intimately about Dublin, while retaining an outsider’s perspective when scrutinising fault lines in his family’s and his country’s history.”
“Liberty Hall, however, is no travel guide. It finds O’Loughlin circling his own life and that of his family; the cities and countries he has called home; Europe as geographical and political construct and the expression of what a poetry collection can be.”
Praise for Poems 1980-2015:
“These poems from three and a half decades constitute European poetry in the mask of English, and they are a unique addition to the Capital of Letters.”
“Few writers have written so accurately and so unsentimentally about Dublin, in a tone equally at home and displaced in all cultures.”
Gratefully supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.
