Close to the Next Moment

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.

Auteur

Jody Allen Randolph was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at University College Dublin before earning her doctorate in British and American Literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She served as Assistant Dean of the British Studies at Oxford Programme at St. John's College, Oxford and has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara, University College Dublin, and Westmont College in Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching specialities lie in twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, Irish literature and Anglophone poetry. Her essays and interviews have appeared regularly on both sides of the Atlantic.