Leabhar na hAthghabhála

Poems of Repossession

Louis de Paor

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781780373003
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation

Irish-English bilingual edition

This is the first comprehensive critical anthology of modern poetry in Irish with English translations. It forms a sequel to Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella's pioneering anthology, An Duanaire 1600-1900 / Poems of the Dispossessed (1981), but features many more poems in covering the work of 26 poets from the past century.

It includes poems by Pádraig Mac Piarais and Liam S. Gógan from the revival period (1893-1939), and a generous selection from the work of Máirtín Ó Direáin, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, who transformed writing in Irish in the decades following the Second World War, before the Innti poets – Michael Davitt, Liam Ó Muirthile, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Biddy Jenkinson – and others developed new possibilities for poetry in Irish in the 1970s and 80s. It also includes work by more recent poets such as Colm Breathnach, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, Micheál Ó Cuaig and Áine Ní Ghlinn.

The anthology has translations by some of Ireland's most distinguished poets and translators, including Valentine Iremonger, Michael Hartnett, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Bernard O'Donoghue, Maurice Riordan, Peter Sirr, David Wheatley and Mary O'Donoghue, most of them newly commissioned for this project. Many of the poems, including Eoghan Ó Tuairisc's anguished response to the bombing of Hiroshima, 'Aifreann na marbh' [Mass for the dead] have not previously been available in English.

In addition to presenting some of the best poetry in Irish written since 1900, the anthology challenges the extent to which writing in Irish has been underrepresented in collections of modern and contemporary Irish poetry. In his introduction and notes, Louis de Paor argues that Irish language poetry should be evaluated according to its own rigorous aesthetic rather than as a subsidiary of the dominant Anglophone tradition of Irish writing.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (1952–)

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was born to Irish-speaking parents in Lancashire, England, and brought up in Nenagh, County Tipperary, spending part of her childhood with her extended family in the west Kerry Gaeltacht of Corca Dhuibhne. She studied with the other Innti poets at University College Cork before moving with her husband, initially to Holland and then to Turkey, where she taught English for several years, before returning to Ireland and settling in Dublin in 1980.

While she draws on a broad range of writing in several languages, the most significant formative influence on Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry and poetics is the spoken language of Corca Dhuibhne and its oral tradition of songpoems and stories which, she says, provide ‘a plumbline into the subconscious’ (1992: 29), an alternative history and language that record obliquely the psychological and emotional experience of women. Her deep reading in the archives of the National Folklore Collection provides a basis for a feminine discourse that draws on Jungian psychology and feminist ideas of écriture feminine inflected by Irish tradition (Nic Dhiarmada 2005; Ní Fhrighil 2008). As in the poems of Máire Mhac an tSaoi, the continuity between her poetic voice and the Gaelic tradition gives the authority of historical precedent to work which explores female experience in ways that contest and subvert established morality in language that is ‘like that of children brought up by their grandmothers, a hundred years old, a kind of miracle of survival’ (Mhac an tSaoi 1988: 7).

The celebration of female sexuality is central to her work which refuses moral codes that reject the carnal element of human existence; in her early poems, she rewrites some of the most powerful stories in the Christian tradition that insist on sexual continence as the ultimate human achievement. The need to reconcile the physical and the spiritual, the traditional and the individual, is part of a larger project which proposes union and integration rather than the separation and fragmentation authorised by rationalist ‘masculine’ discourse. In her most accomplished work, the quest for integration blurs the rational distinction between the human and natural worlds so that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Clár | Contents
• Aistritheoirí | Translators
• Réamhrá | Introduction
• Pádraig Ó hÉigeartaigh (1871-1936)
• Pádraig Mac Piarais (1879-1916)
• Liam S. Gógan (1891-1979)
• Máirtín Ó Direáin (1910-1988)
• Seán Ó Ríordáin (1916-1977)
• Máire Mhac an tSaoi (1922–)
• Eoghan Ó Tuairisc (1919-1982)
• Seán Ó Tuama (1926-2006)
• Tomás Mac Síomóin (1938–)
• Conleth Ellis (1937-1988)
• Caitlín Maude (1941-1982)
• Cathal Ó Searcaigh (1956–)
• Micheál Ó hAirtnéide (1941-1999)
• Michael Davitt (1950-2005)
• Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (1952–)
• Áine Ní Ghlinn (1955–)
• Deirdre Brennan (1934–)
• Liam Ó Muirthile (1950–)
• Micheál Ó Cuaig (1950–)
• Seán Ó Curraoin (1942–)
• Derry O’Sullivan (1944–)
• Biddy Jenkinson (1949–)
• Colm Breathnach (1961–)
• Louis de Paor (1961–)
• Gearóid Mac Lochlainn (1966–)
• Ord foilsithe na ndánta | Chronology of publication
• Aistritheoirí | Translators
• Nótaí na n-aistritheoirí | Translators’ notes
• Nótaí ar dhánta | Notes on individual poems
• Logainmneacha | Place names
• Tagairtí | References
• Buíochas | Acknowledgements
• Dánta in ord aibítre | Index of Irish titles
• Aistriúcháin in ord aibítre | Index of English titles
• Filí in ord aibítre | Index of poets
• Copyright