In the first decade of the new millennium, Jody Allen Randolph interviewed twenty-two leading Irish poets, artists, fiction writers and playwrights to create a record of how the makers of a culture saw their country as it moved into a new era. Her exploration was shadowed by intimations of unease; as economic collapse gathered pace, recurrent concerns gained a new urgency. What are Irish values? How have they changed? How do new cultural realities affect the old arts of language and image which have been so important in Irish tradition? In journeys across political divides and between languages, from Seamus Heaney and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, deeply rooted in Irish inheritance, to the African-Irish writer Joyce Akpotor; from Gerry Adams for whom 'when our future is settled, we will agree on our history', to the artist Dorothy Cross who brings an international perspective to her redefinitions of traditional Irish imagery, Close to the Next Moment captures the conversations that are remaking a culture.
