The Irish bard Trevor Joyce is a di...

The Irish bard Trevor Joyce is a distant cousin of his novelist namesake, as I learned when a glazier repairing a window of Joyce's house, stammering in a fit of rage through a mainstream poetry critic at the party that conclud an avant-garde poesy festival held in Cork, said that if he'd known of the relationship he'd have done the work for half-price. That's the work reputation can do in Ireland, and, granting the tensions that led to that incident of the stammering window were not exclusively literary, it does provide a fitting image for the knockabout absurdities of distinctions between