Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda
Moving from yesterday’s flower, the meadow saxifrage, to a moss species no longer found in Ireland. The demise of “mud capped stone walls”, as outlined below, is another example of…
I began this exploration of species extinct in Ireland with a fish, the sturgeon., have moved through mammals and insects, but only now am moving to plants. And predictably enough…
In the summer of 1999 I visited the World Trade Center, going up the elevator to Windows on The World. I often wondered if the jovial elevator operator was on…
This was the first story I had published on the now defunct nthposition.com. It owes a little too much to a certain J G Ballard story, but re-reading it…
Originally posted on The Immortal Jukebox:
What are we made of? Well, you could say we are mainly Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium and Phosphorous. Add some pinches of Potassium,…
The current New Yorker features a piece by Brooke Jarvis on the maybe-extinct, maybe-not Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine. About fifteen years ago I had a cryptozoological phase, with occasional relapses.…
In a letter of 12 August 1977 to Robert Conquest, Kingsley Amis wrote: The Faber Book of Non-Trendy Verse has been easier and is going faster: a careful look through…
Visiting the Killamery High cross, I spied just to the south of the cross a striking gravestone, that of “William Costello, of the parish of Grangemocler”. With a little bit…
Séamus Sweeney 