Kimberly Campanello | Tolka Issue Seven, July 2025 The poets K and G live on neighbouring islands. They have never met, but they follow each other’s writing and know the look of each other’s haircuts, vacations, spouses, G’s child and K’s nieces and her friends’ children who chalk her garden walls, pots and statues with flowers, faces and I RULE. The two poets know the look of their mutual commitment to bodybuilding. The two poets write about traumatic historical and personal events. Rather than coming up with their own words, they locate language that has been used already to write or speak about these terrible things. They carefully separate parts of this language from the body of the texts, shaping it to reveal the form of what is really there, what is really felt. Eventually another poet remarked upon their respective gym photos and suggested that K and G write...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, October 2023 This Plague of Souls is Mike McCormack’s fourth novel. It follows Nealon, an artist who has returned from prison following the collapse of a criminal trial against him. His family home in rural Mayo is empty, and he is besieged by phone calls from a stranger determined to meet up. The third act of the novel stages this meeting against the backdrop of a national security crisis. Through a breadth and style that is typical of McCormack’s writing, the distinctions between the local and the global begin to break down: ‘Those oil spills and poisoned lakes, those great gyres of plastic waste spiralling in the southern Atlantic. There were things coming apart, falling from their proper being’. McCormack is the author of the novels Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes from a Coma (2005), as well as the short-story collections Getting It in...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, April 2022 Rob Doyle’s latest book, Autobibliography (2021), originated from an Irish Times book column, where he was asked to write once a week throughout 2019 about a pre-twenty-first-century work of literature, at no more than 340 words per book. He describes it as ‘the book chat equivalent of haiku condensation’. The other half of Autobibliography is a mirror text of sorts, written during lockdown in 2020, and are reflections upon these reflections on books, spanning many different kinds of writing, including memoir, anecdotes, travelogue and other, less categorisable forms. Doyle is the author of the short-story collection This Is the Ritual (2016), as well as the novels Threshold (2020) and Here are the Young Men (2014), which has recently been made into a film. Liam Harrison (LH): What was the experience of writing the shadowy half of Autobibliography, which came after writing your...

Mark O’Connell | Tolka, Issue Four, June 2023 For nine years, from 2013 until the start of this year, I lived with my family in Stoneybatter. Most mornings, if it wasn’t raining, I would walk my son to school on the far side of the Liffey. As we crossed the quays my attention would often be drawn towards a four-storey red-brick building, which was the only remaining Georgian house in a row of humbler buildings – a low, squat car-upholstery business on one side and a block of modern apartments on the other. Always the house was unlit from within, and unoccupied. Its windows were thickly grimed with dirt from the heavy passing traffic. The granite steps up to its arched and fan-lit front door were sprouting grass and weeds. When I looked down over its railings into its basement entrance, I often saw piles of miscellaneous urban flotsam –...