Houseparty at Baldriggera
Stage play as performed in The Hawk’s Well Theatre, Sligo, 1985. Lord Maulte invites prominent politicians from north (Rev Wm Blaikie, Ms Billie Gallagher, Sam Ferguson MP) & south (Oliver Grattan McGreal TD, Séamus Stark TD) to his mansion on the border. All agree to come if there is to be foolproof security; however, since each side thinks the house is on the other side of the border, nobody arranges for same. The butler thinks fit to invite the UDA & the IRA, unbeknownst to each other. Ructions! Prose version written into Say Nothing in Collected Writings 2.

Peacemonger & Other Satires
Satirical verses. Double standards? Why bomb tyranny in Iraq & support it in Saudi? They’d all read Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard 1984 & the 1992 PNAC: they knew it was about oil. Shock & Awe? “The world’s a safer place tonight?” Gen Franks: “this war’s been planned for years!” Democracy in Palestine - the elephant in the room? Remember Twin Towers - & forget Panama? Failed pop-star Blair turns Catholic? His First Confession: “I stole sweets Father.” “Yes my child.” “I was disobeejent.” “Yes my child.” “I told lies.” “Now now, my child, these are just peccadilloes the nuns suggest to little boys so they’ll have something to confess.” “But in my case it’s true!” And other targets. Composed 1970-2005. Also to be found in Collected Writings 2.

Sauce for the Gander
Being Book Two of Say Nothing Till You Hear More. Also to be found in Collected Writings 2. An Update on Dante’s Commedia. The Baldriggera butler Rory Devine is taken on a tour of the underworld. Much has been privatised since Dante’s time, but the same basic notion holds: World “Statesmen’ find things not entirely to their liking. They get what they chose in this life, except that it’s what they chose for other people - e.g., shock, awe, other unpleasantries. They wallow in their own stercorous verbiage; exploiters starve, frauds are deceived, &c.

How to Roast A Strasbourg Goose
Verse play, modern myth based on an actual case brought by the Irish Government to Strasbourg, 1979: to a charge of torture (see McGuffin’s Internment) the British with their usual Perfidious Albionics, entered no plea; the judges said: no plea entered means no charge to answer ... This text was rejected in 1985 by the Abbey Theatre: “rather more tact is called for ...” Tact! The author (faute de mieux) did it solo, around 200 perfs. “Epic poetic satire - savagely indignant” (F.O’Toole) “Brilliantly absurd” (The Scotsman). “Everything I been thinking for 40 years in an hour ’n ’a haef - how does he do it?” (Jungian lady in Buffalo NY). His Reality Ultimate the 1st & Last is arraigned in the Court of Tír na nÓg - “needless maltreatment of the human species” - prosecuted by a Camus type. The hearing results in a huge explosion; Lord Reason survives, as do some self-effacing pre-Celtic deities now practising as traditional musicians ... Also in SAY NOTHING, Collected Works 2.

Power Plays
Also in CW1. Two texts for Theatre. Critique of slogans, demos, merely theoretical Answers to Everything. In The Emerald Oil Company a fictional seer is thrust onstage, sans script, by his absconding author. His task (“you’ll work it out!&148;) is to envision the activity that is criminally misusing the world’s resources. What he sees: a Universal Death-Wish; one all-powerful Moloch-worshipper controls everything, thru his computerised assistants, Da Siva & Des Troy, engagingly virtual personalities. Over-riding principle of governance: child-sacrifice must be factored into every single financial operation ... It Goes On: What is to be done? Tha People engage in a worldwide conspiracy - but is it too late?

Alexander the Lesser
Quiet humorous semi-autobiographical fiction, about growing up in Portstewart, Co.Derry, from the age of three, during & after WW2. Hints of cultural disagreements. Alexander’s mother, widowed & needing to find work, sends him away to a Dublin boarding school, where he learns to cope with such innocence as he is supposed to possess ... Incorporated into Alexander the Careerist.

Alexander the Careerist
Contains the Portstewart Childhood text. Alexander (the Lesser) grows up in Catholic Ireland North & South, fails to enlist in the ranks of The Church Militant while learning bad habits in an English seminary, emerges into the UK secular meritocracy - the Welfare State of the fifties, which provides for him handsomely, teaches him Russian during service in the RN, Kamchatka in Cornwall, allows him to squander years as a dilettante cricketing philosopher among the dreaming spires, to hitch-hike thru Europe while wishing for the gifts of Mozart, & to drift into a career as a teacher malgré soi - he isn’t fit for anything else. Also in Collected Writings 1.

Two Island Plays
Two plays written & staged 1977-8 in Inishbofin, Don Bosco Grainne & The Dole - a piece of anti-social-realism, written for & performed by the islanders, expresses trenchant views on the relationship of Art & The People. Played during the Arts Week & subsequently. Sculptures accidentally come alive & walk away - one of the risks you have to take with really great art. An ivory tower writer advances his theory of self deception, the artist as “innocent criminal, if you follow me.” The Connemara Triangle is a sci-fi farce. Worried by alienation, pollution, atom bomb, an extra-terrestrial race materialise one of their number, equip him with pinstripe suit, briefcase, Oxford accent. One thing he must at all costs avoid: alcohol. He is set down one the westernmost island in Europe ...

The 2nd Grand Confabulation of Drum Ceat, &c.. As played in Dublin Theatre Festival 1989. An Ars-Poetica-cum-Everything-Elsica ... Merrimanesque Critique of Academic Apparatchiki, Deconstruction Garbage, Turner Prize Cant, & the Dialects of Sociologese & Obscuranto. Loaded with wodges of satirical verse & brazen pastiche. The 1st Convention of Drum Ceat, in 593 A.D., was summoned as a Poet-Cull - the poets had grown to number one third of the entire population. Now a 2nd Drum Ceat conjures Real Poets from all ages, to Deal with a Dire Surfeit of Academics who have overrun every value including the idea of poetry - tenure is all they care about. A Jousting ensues - Professorial Imperturbables v. Poetic Diffidents! Behold the Sons of Ulster Tramping Towards Faber & Faber! “There may be a place for intelligence in the Theatre but ...” (Irish Times.) But what? Excerpts also to be found in Collected Writings 1.

Poems 1957-2006
Poems, written since 1957. Early influences include Pound (“free verse must still be verse - each line having its necessary rhythm”) Montale, St.John Perse, Anhava, the Psalter. Aims as it were to make music out of the resonances of verbal images, scraps & details. Stylistic concerns move from imagistic (“never use an abstract noun till you’re thirty”) to social-conversational to political-personal-polemic. Collects most of Girl With Violin, Priorities, Sensualities, some Scurrilities, adding The Fiagach & others hitherto unpublished. Interpretations include complete Sappho, & versions from Dante & Aeschylus. Also to be found distributed in Collected Writings 1.

Collected Writings, Vol. 1
Personal concerns. A thematic arrangement in seven books (often semi-autobiographical) of work developed 1957-2005. In “Ramore” Alexander might have wished for a spiritual career. He grows a sensibility fit for nothing but literary endeavour. “Shannow” is an “experimental’ writing, in a personal landscape hung with lexical mobiles; the effect is musical rather than narrative until life intervenes - as if the time-signature had changed to nineteen-&-elevenpence-three-farthings. “Leocan”: an agitprop romp round Dublin ’70s - games with guns. “Sherca”: a playtext after Sophocles: dropout revolutionary with ESP gift. “Dugort”: island family life, pottering about with ineffectual co-op commitments; excusable in Ireland, enough to get you shot in El Salvador. “Turma”: ideas bang their heads against establishment walls, with much polemical resonance. “The Fiagach”: treats of marital discord - The Shaming of the True - will you get blamed for what you didn’t do? Shouldn’t you?

Collected Writings, Vol. 2
Public Concerns. Fiction, Verse, Memoirs, Journal, Correspondence, Polemics & a Poloniad. The satirical novel Say Nothing Till You Hear More offers a scabrous view of wars & other injustices, thru updates on Irish legend & Dante’s Commedia. Peacemonger & Dao Jones - political verses attack all the elephants in the room; for full frontal assault robust traditional scansion is de rigueur. The Immodest Proposal - 200 acerbic Byronic stanzas, previously published (2005) by Lapwing. Memoirs of an Expatriarch brings us back to 1960s Leeson Street, with excursions - e.g. to Iowa City. The remainder of the book reproduces polemical opinions & letters to editors, largely unpublished, often unpublishable.

Little Red Hen Ireland
LRH promotes the work of S.B.Smith, work produced since 1957. The author after seven years retired from teaching & took to living in remote places, being published by such as Dolmen Press & Raven Arts, & broadcasting on occasion; also took to stage work, in the 1980s, with some success (see reviews below.) Of recent years, publication in book form has proved harder to come by: the “major” publishers care only for the Bottom Line; quality Reviews bemoan this fact but - knickers-in-a-twist - rule quality Writing out unless it comes from an “established” publisher - fruitless expectation, improbable outcome.

Here, dear reader - thanks, not to Fifi, Mimi or Gigi, but to Lulu! - you may inspect our wares, view the covers front & (recommended) back, whet your appetite on sample pages from each title (click on Preview), & trusting to your own impeccable taste, order online or download, or logoff without more ado. All without being trampled by the easy-read hordes & stifling in the cliche-laden air of mainstreet emporia. Civilised!

The plan is to produce all the work in hardback. Paperbacks will carry individual works & selected verses, & audio discs & a DVD of the author in performance will follow.

About Sydney Bernard Smith
Father from Forfar, mother from Clare, S.B.Smith, born 1936 in Glasgow, grew up in Portstewart, Co. Derry, was schooled in Clongowes Wood College near Dublin, studied languages in Oxford, strove to become a cricketer or classical musician, taught faute de mieux, travelled intermittently, married Cindy Hoxie, sought roots, moved to & flourished in Inishbofin, fathered four children, wrote & acted, failed to change the world, expects to expire shortly in Dundalk - a crab is lunching on the liver, as of May 2007.

From 1977 to 2003 writing & directing own shows in venues up & down Ireland, & in London, as well as on the Edinburgh Fringe; & in the US.

Theatre Reviews: Emerging from How To Roast A Strasbourg Goose (in Buffalo NY) one lady of Jungian persuasion exclaimed “everything I been thinking for 40 years in an hour’n’a half - how does he do it?” One of the Abbey Theatre’s readers complained she couldn’t understand it, & an Abbey dramaturg thought its material - (political corruption & torture) called for “rather more tact.’ Contrast: “Strasbourg Goose ... epic poetic satire ... savagely indignant odyssey through the convolutions of torture, legality & corruption. Tour de force ... splendid performance ... passionate clarity ...” Fintan O’Toole, Sunday Tribune, Oct 6, 1985. “ ...a hint of genius ...that theatrical rarity, an accomplished actor who is also an intellectual… He is very much in the great Dublin tradition of the erudite wit.” Charles Fitzgerald, Belfast Newletter, June 3, 1989 “A ferocious flagrantly funny intellect.” Terry Doran, Buffalo News, Feb 5, 1993 “uncompromisingly funny ... brilliantly absurd” Sara O’Sullivan, The Scotsman, Aug 30, 1995

Reviews of Priorities (1979) “Compared to the cold fastidiousness of many poets, Smith’s openness, wounded & wounding, comic & pathetic, is fresh air.” Brian Lynch, Sunday Press: “European in form & content, appeals in direct, humorous & strong language to human decencies.” John F.Deane, Poetry Ireland: “a love for the witty , lying possibilities within language.” Thomas McCarthy, Irish Times: “angry, energetic” James Simmons, Books Ireland: “Ireland’s most experimental poet”. Irish Independent [as in: Holland’s loftiest peak.]