Читать книгу Reconstructions - Steafán Hanvey - Страница 10

Foreword Billy O’Callaghan

Author of The Dead House, and The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind and Other Stories.

Steafán Hanvey must rank as one of Ireland’s best-kept secrets – poet, film-maker and singer-songwriter of the first order, a striking and unique talent ripe with the experience of a hundred lives lived and a thousand more observed. For the past several years, he has toured the world with a highly acclaimed multimedia performance incorporating songs, spoken word and projections from his father’s vast collection.

World-renowned photographer Bobbie Hanvey was the eye that captured forever, in all their unflinching glory, some of Northern Ireland’s most defining moments. Now, set in context by some of Steafán’s most authentic, innovative and keenly honed prose poetry, these images take on even greater resonance. The result is an astonishing and visceral work that strikes clean to the often dark but always shining heart of Northern Ireland during its most troubled decades. It makes for the purest and highest art, a heady combination of words that set the pictures alight and pictures that tell a thousand stories, spanning the entire scale between black and white, infusing the devastation and trauma of their subject matter with the strength, determination, courage and hope that defines, as only the finest art can, a place and its people. Reconstructions is a celebration of life and a validation of two lives’ work.