You Are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living Henri Nouwen (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) Anthony
 Redmond   I have read quite a few of Henri Nouwen’s books and he never fails to move and inspire me. I never seem to tire of him. He was a profoundly spiritual, prayerful man, but he always struck me as lonely,…

Leabhar Urnaí an Timire níl aon eagarthóir ainmnithe (Foilseacháin Ábhar Spioradálta, €5) Tadhg
 Ó 
Dúshláine   This slim volume of less than 50 pages will come as a godsend to the increasing number of teachers in Gaelscoileanna, under the trusteeship of the Church, charged with the transmission of the faith in a broken culture, where the rich heritage…

Gooch: The Autobiography by Colm Cooper (Transworld, €20.00)   At the outset Cooper explains the origin of his nickname. It arose because when he was eight years old he had a passing resemblance to red-haired ‘Goochie’ dolls popular at that time. The real heroes in this book are Colm’s parents, Mike and Maureen. They began their…

The World of Books by the books editor   The literary commemoration of the Great War takes many curious forms these days. But none can be more curious than the recent suggestion by Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, that a  new renaissance of war poetry should be encouraged among modern soldiers. He had in…

Over the 160 years since the world first heard of Bernadette Soubirous’s visionary experiences of the Blessed Virgin Mary in a grotto outside the town of Lourdes much has been has been written about the events of the summer of 1858 by both sceptics and believers. These events have also, however, given rise to two…

Novels are but one way of exploring the dimension of a subject. Many still prefer non-fiction accounts of such a phenomenon as Lourdes. For this anniversary no distinctive new books have been published in either English or French. But this seems scarcely to matter for some excellent books are still available, new, second hand or…

Since 1858, when the first miracles were recorded, the Church has judged only a very small number of cures as truly miraculous – to date some 69. The Church can be as sceptical at times as any Zola. The most recent recognition was in 2013 of the curing of Mrs Danila Castelli, suffering from a…

Hopeful Hopkins, essays by Desmond Egan (The Goldsmith Press, €20.00) Noel
 Barber
 SJ   In these essays, Desmond Egan sets himself a clear goal: to correct the image of Fr Gerard Manley Hopkins as a “sick and self-lacerating person” and to present “the energetic, witty and hope filled” person that existed alongside the “physically frail, hypersensitive, nervous…

The Poet’s Chair: Writings from the Ireland Chair of Poetry (UCD Press, €20.00 each volume) The Ireland Chair of Poetry Trust was established in 1998 jointly by Queen’s University Belfast, TCD, UCD, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and An Chomhairle Ealaíon. Every three years a distinguished poet is selected to hold the Chair as…

A Little Book of Ledwidge: A Selection of Poems and Letters of Francis Ledwidge compiled by John Quinn, with an assessment by Seamus Heaney (Veritas, €9.99) India to Ithaca by Paula Lahiff (€10.00; €12.50 including postage, contact paulalahiff@gmail.com) Santiago Sketches by David McLoghlin (Salmon Poetry, €12.00) In Ireland the role of the poet has been respected since prehistoric…