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POETRY IS one of humanity's oldest forms of artistic and personal expression, found across all eras, languages, and cultures. Today is Poetry Day and Galway will mark the venerable form with a number of events.

Athlone Little Theatre is to host an evening of readings, music, and song inspired by the events of the Easter Rising, Trí Cheol, Filíocht agus Amhranaíocht. It will take place on Friday April 22, almost 100 years to the day since the reading of the Proclamation.

On Friday November 29 1940, a tiny new bookshop opened its doors for the first time on High Street in Galway city. Little could its proprietors, Des and Maureen Kenny, have then envisaged that this modest business start-up – embarked upon when Ireland was in the early stages of World War II rationing - would go on to be one of Ireland’s foremost bookshops and art galleries and, over its six decades, a valued friend to many of the country’s most eminent writers and artists.

THE KENNY Gallery and Bookshop has reached its 75th year in business and to mark this platinum milestone, it hosts an exhibition, celebrating through 75 different objects, the fascinating history of this family-owned Galway institution.

Artists can be very awkward at times. They don’t always conform to decisions made on their behalf. They rarely behave nicely if they disagree with authority.

IN WHAT is probably the best poem in Jane Clarke’s debut collection, The River, published by Bloodaxe, the narrator asks “Who owns the field?//Is it the one who is named in the deeds/whose hands never touched the clay/or is it the one who gathers the sheaves//takes a scythe to the thistles, plants the beech?"

Irish traditional music is one of the great survivors of history. Maybe it was because we are an island, way off on our own in the western Atlantic, and until the latter decades of the last  century, out of hearing from the mass cultural movements of popular cinema, radio and TV, especially the modern music from Europe and the US, that something distinctive has survived. As a boy I would only hear traditional music sessions in a few Gaelteacht areas, or from the welcoming Standún family in Spiddal, or at the Féiseanna at An Taibhdhearc, which was more memorable for the day off from school than it was for the music.

Most of us are mad jealous that we cannot claim some kind of connection with Caherlistrane. A new book by Mary J Murphy*  manages to link the north Galway parish with an extraordinary number of writers, artists, singers, poets, actors, and historical personalities, that leave all other parishes in Ireland bereft of personality and character. There can be no other competition. We are all characterless by comparison to Caherlistrane.

FROM WHAT some would consider inauspicious beginnings, Doire Press has flourished to become a professionally run publisher of quality new fiction and poetry. One of its publications was last year shortlisted for the massively prestigious UK based Forward poetry prize; and Doire is now, quite rightly, in receipt of Arts Council funding.

TWENTY-NINE years later, the route directions still resonate: “You drive as far as Malin Head and reverse 10 mile”. These were given to my brother Tom in 1986 when he received an invitation to what turned out to be one of the more singular book launches he ever attended.