Cork composer Bernard Geary returns to his hometown to hear one of his pieces performed at the choral festival, writes Cathy Desmond

For decades Paul Durcan has mapped our Free State as it descended into Hell. No other poet was so well-prepared for this prolonged and bitter cartography. Thomas McCarthy on his latest collection

Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances, RF Foster, Oxford University Press, €22.95

The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry