At the heart of Maurice Riordan's third collection is a sequence of
eighteen dramatic idylls set in rural Cork in the 1950s, in which
the subdued microcosm of farm and smallholding - of boundary,
townland and parish - is defined through the individual voices of
the poet's father and assorted friends, farmhands and neighbours
(Moss, Dan-Jo, Davey Divine, the Bo'son, Uncle Tom the Buck, the
Gully). The settings of these loosely contiguous fragments almost
casually define a historical community, ranging around farm and
fields, through furze and ragwort, headland and plantation, haggard
and Bog - tracing the immemorial scenes of traditional farming
life: cutting drains, harvesting, fencing, potato planting, beet
topping a?" and their close and intimate topography is recalled
with a Proustian fidelity to names (the Long Field, the Kiln Field,
the Small Fields, the Hill Fields, Higgs's Field, the Passage, the
old Deer Park, the Orchard, the Bottom Glen) The tentative oral
fluidity of these remarkable poems flickers on the borderline of
prose, resolving complexities into an impression of timeless
pastoral life, at once archaic yet precisely pitched in time. Other
poems in The Holy Land proffer alternative forms of capture and
recapture, and resemble light-sensitive plates storing and
restoring what one poem refers to as 'the understory'. Thus the
stilled life of 1950s rural Ireland is recreated, with echoes of
classical models such as Theocritus, or of traditional Irish
materials from the Fenian cycle, celebrating 'the music of what
happens'. As Patrick Kavanagh wrote in his poem 'Epic': 'I have
lived in important places, times when great events were decided:
who owned that half a rood of rock...'
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