Kieran Beville

  The Stony Thursday Book Golden Jubilee By Kieran Beville When a small poetry journal outlives governments, economic booms and busts, and whole movements in literature, something extraordinary has occurred. This November marks the publication of the fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Stony Thursday Book, a Limerick-born poetry journal that has quietly, doggedly, and with admirable grace become one of the longest-running literary publications in Ireland. Fittingly, its founders, John Liddy and Jim Burke, have returned as guest editors for this golden jubilee edition, closing a remarkable circle that began in 1975 when they first decided that Limerick deserved a literary voice of its own. Fifty years on, that voice still rings — sometimes softly, sometimes with a rougher edge — but always with sincerity. The story of The Stony Thursday Book is one of perseverance and poetry, of civic imagination and cultural stubbornness. It is also, as its title hints, a story of Limerick ...

  Great Gig Ignites Musical Memories By Kieran Beville There are few things more reliable than the cathartic power of a great guitar riff. On Thursday, 30th October, at the University Concert Hall in Limerick, that truth was on full display when Rock Rising: The Supreme Classic Rock Show rolled into town. The audience was a cross-section of generations: grey-haired veterans in tour t-shirts from the 1980s sat beside students who might have first heard these songs through Spotify algorithms rather than vinyl sleeves. But once the opening chords tore through the hall, it didn’t matter who was from which decade. The music — the eternal language of melody, and shared memory — levelled everyone into a single, roaring congregation. The Concept Behind the Sound Rock Rising isn’t a band in the conventional sense, but a curated collective of top-tier Irish rock musicians dedicated to resurrecting the spirit of the greats. Conceived as a live theatre production rather than a mere co...

Exploring Our Outdoor Gallery The statues and murals of our Limerick city By Kieran Beville Rising from the banks of the River Shannon, Limerick is a place where stone and story entwine. From medieval battlements to bronze tributes, its monuments and statues whisper tales of resistance, resilience, and renaissance. To stroll through Limerick is to walk beside history in full view — carved in limestone, cast in bronze, and etched into the public imagination. The Dockers – A Tribute to the Working Class Along Howley’s Quay stands The Dockers , a bronze sculpture by Michael Duhan (brother of the artist/writer Eric Duhan and the Late Johnny Duhan) that honours the generations of men who laboured on Limerick’s bustling waterfront. Stoic and muscular, the figures strain under the weight of a large plank, possibly a railway sleeper. This is a striking homage to the backbone of the city’s economy throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The evocative piece reminds passers-by that Lime...

                     A Critical Study of the Poetry of W.B. Yeats By Kieran Beville Few poets have so thoroughly shaped both the literary and imaginative landscape of Ireland as William Butler Yeats. Across five decades of creative development, Yeats transformed from a romantic dreamer of Celtic myth to a modernist master of disciplined form and philosophical depth. His career embodies the tension between national identity and personal vision, between the mystical and the material, and between language as inheritance and as self-creation. This essay examines Yeats’s achievement as a poet of transition — a writer who forged a distinctly Irish modernism in English, infusing the language with rhythms and imagery drawn from Ireland’s landscape, history, and consciousness. Yeats and the Creation of an Irish English Yeats’s relationship with language is central to his work. Though he wrote in English, he sought a diction that coul...