Author: andrew

Not prepared to be outdone by NASA, India or China, the Skipper has followed up on his pioneering ‘Moonshot’ from Inishbofin with further lunar missions. We are pleased to be the first to announce that there are substantial oceans on the dark side of the moon, swarming with shoals of herring, a myriad times larger than those once to be landed across the Minch, undreamt of quantities of turbot, halibut, monkfish and other high-value catches (notably langoustine) in quantities never found in Earth’s oceans even at their most lavish, not even on the Porcupine Bank. There is also an abundance of ice with a turn-around time between Lunaport and Billingsgate faster than anything out of Killibegs or Peterhead. A chain of ‘Archipelago Seafood’ restaurants is due to open, up and down the islands of Britain and Ireland, before the year is out with the Skipper likely to become the first ever Fish Billionaire, thus transforming the finances of Archipelago beyond our wildest dreams.

We’d like to draw your attention to David Gange’s new book Afloat – published this month – material in which we’re proud to think underwent sea-trials in our pages.

Also, a belated find and most affecting story of his not untroubled and lyrical youth-time by Gerry Cambridge. May the alluring cover clutch your heart and lure you in.

Archipelago 2:5

Contents

Editorial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Frontispiece: Ferrule by Michael Longley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Cathal Ó Searcaigh
            Gairm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Paddy Bushe
            Calling translation of Gairm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

M. Wynn Thomas
            Walescape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Robert Minhinnick
           Poppy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
           Midnight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Andrew McNeillie
           In this Great Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kyffin Williams
           R. S. Thomas, drawing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
           The Ogwen Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Elinor Gwynn
           Goleuedigaeth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Robert Minhinnick
           The Hare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

David Lea
           Batscape, Harringay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sinéad Morrissey
           How to Find a Cave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Fiona Stafford
           The Prospect of a Lost Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Pamela Clemit
           Songs of the North . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Vona Groarke
           The Sligo Way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Fran Brearton
           ‘Over the sand and snow’: Michael Longley’s otter prints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Lillis Ó Laoire
           Unquenchable Thirst, Tart Dochoiscthe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Bernard O’Donoghue
           The Yellow Bittern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Cathal Ó Searcaigh
           Gairm Na gCloch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Paddy Bushe
           The Stone Calling translation of Gairm Na gCloch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Nicholas Allen
           Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sinéad Morrissey
           Howick Mesolithic Hut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Matthew Campbell
           Heaney Country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Paddy Bushe
           Heaney at Carnota . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Brannigan
           The Singular Peace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chris McGonigle
           Allt an Duibhéin, looking east to An Griánán, N Rathlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chris McGonigle
           Like Seeing a Rainbow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
                      The corner of the foundations of the ruined chapel on Texa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
                      Paps of Jura . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jason Hicklin
           Islay Panoramas
                      Rathlin Island from the Mull of Oa on Islay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
                      Texa and Tarr Sgeir from Kilnaughton Bay, Islay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
                      The Sound of Islay from Rubha Bhachlaig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
                      Jura from the Sound of Islay. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alan Riach
           Beyond Hallaig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kirsty Gunn
           Ben Dorain: In the Shadow of a Mountain Part III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Garry MacKenzie
           Poetry – Place – Plastics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Norman Ackroyd
           The Bass Rock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Purser
           The Shed on the Shore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Pàdraig MacAoidh
           Am Melancholly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Frank Rennie
           Coming Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Tim Ecott
           Stóra Dímun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Eva Chupíková
           Cliffs of Sandoy, Faroe Islands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

In a time of the breaking of nations, as we surely are (as Thomas Hardy wrote: ‘Yet this will go onward the same / Though Dynasties pass’), it is salutary to read not just Hardy’s poem but even more, perhaps, the poetry of the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BCE), better known to us as Horace.

Hardy read Horace. ‘The Breaking of Nations’ poem doesn’t lead us directly to the Roman poet, but other poems of Hardy’s do, notably ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ (on the loss of the Titanic).

Horace can’t quite be said to have been at the hot gates at Philippi in 42BCE. But he was there, a soldier in reserve, in Brutus’s ultimately doomed army. He saw the horrific carnage up close. It was the horror ‘done’. He would later famously write of ‘the horror left undone’. It’s something we know about.

Horace is one of those great poets whose work is so diverse and emotionally profound, deceptively commonplace, by the most artful sleight of hand, it can’t be satisfactorily categorised. But he was inter alia a war poet. His eventual patron was Gaius Maecenas, advisor to the man who would become the Emperor Augustus. Primarily concerned with the art of poetry, as poets ought to be, Horace was a humorous rhetorician who knew how to court risk, how to tease truth to power, and get away with it.

Peter Stothard’s Horace: Poet on a Volcano (from Yale University Press) in its c. 300 pages manages with fine economy and immensely readable sentences to integrate life and times (and what times) in a most compelling narrative. We
recommend it to all our readers disturbed by the horror currently being done, as ‘Rome’ continues to fall. Not least on the postcolonial island of Britain, which Horace, in his poem to the Goddess Fortuna, referred to (here in David Ferry’s
translation) as ‘that savage island of the Britons / Out at the end of the earth’.

Nowadays that savage island may be considered merely a province in Donald Trump’s Empire, doing what it’s told, or else. A lot of that kind of thing went on in the Roman world, not least after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Frame that with Vladmir Putin’s psychotic violence, Xi Jinping’s menacing imperialism, and the atrocities witnessed daily in Gaza, then the life, times, and poetry of Horace, educated in Athens, allied by fate with Brutus, has much to tell us and to help us cope with ‘the horror’ in its present dispensation. He shows us too how a public and political poetry might be written, subtly and obliquely. Hardy could do the same. His ‘Breaking of Nations’ poem ends on a note of hope, though hard to take comfort from:

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

We thought you’d enjoy this review. If you haven’t ordered your copy of either or both yet, here’s an incentive perhaps to do so and to help the Lilliput Press in its cause. 

As we all know beginnings are multi-dimensional and as impossible to locate definitively as it is to map a coastline down to its last micro-nano fractal, as Zeno and Tim Robinson both knew. But scaling up the map from there is how we live most of our days. On which scale, I’ll take you back to 3 November 1968. That was when at twenty-two and with all my worldly goods I made landfall on Inis Mór. I am aware how often I refer to that time, how thoroughly it haunts me still, and what that might say about my pathology and all the other years of my life. Here is a poem on the subject, a belated SOS. Is there anyone out there with a life-line?

The Scene of my Undoing, All Over Again

I drew a line Latitude 53° 07´ with my ruler
from November to October.
A clean line I thought
like a break with the past.
Then I stood back.
A line under what?
Too much to keep out.

Here I go, I said to myself,
all over again, in-between
W. Longitude 9° 50´ and 37´ –
minutes like me that don’t move on
with 45 bisecting the bay
where I’d like my ashes strewn
at highwater one day.

Where wintering waders
pipe and scatter
and in spring the lark continuously singing
climbs from haven to heaven –
to stoop and loop in silence down again
as I revisit the scene
of my undoing.

And in the month of June
do I need to say
the corncrake’s asymmetry
and the one-eyed cimetière marin
blowing forever
to the echo of hooves and waves
in that eavesdropping time.

Time from November to October
that so possesses me still,
surely there must be
something wrong with me?
O come to my rescue if you will.
You have the coordinates.
And may you find me soon,
there or here, I don’t mind.

You can also find someone purporting to be me in Andrew McNeillie’s book An Aran Keening, first published by the Lilliput Press, Dublin, in 2001, now reissued and available again in handsome new livery, as here:

Also a new, previously unpublished prequel to it: News of the World (2025), allowing you to look further into the pathology of ‘the playboy’ and the hold Inis Mór exerted over him in his youth and young-manhood.

Do please go to the Lilliput website and order copies to support their valiant cause. Also available via the London Review Bookshop. If you have a copy already, make someone else happy, or sad. Now, keep it to yourself, as we say when we want the cat out of the bag, but, according to people informed on the matter (as the Financial Times is given to saying, on topics of far less weight), the Skipper is out fishing, nightfishing currently, very much in the dark, for a new issue of Archipelago. We expect he’ll make landfall here in November, for auld lang syne.

We doubt there’ll be more to report until the end of the year when all will be revealed, as the old man holds course for the inglorious twelfth and his eightieth birthday (DV). The last we heard he was shooting his net at the western approaches to the Menai Strait. He plans then to head north in the direction of the Isle of Staffa. From there it’s anyone’s guess where he’ll surface next. All we can say is that the ‘catch’ this time will revert to the proportions of the earlier issues. Postal charges on ‘bumper’ issues are crippling to bear.

A day of readings and performance at the Weston Library (Bodleian Library) Oxford

– Saturday 26 April 2025 –

 to celebrate:

Clutag Press 2000-2025

Archipelago 2: 4 

Contents

PLEASE ORDER YOUR COPY AS SOON AS YOU CAN!

Customers in the Irish Republic please note: NORMAL SERVICE HAS BEEN RESUMED

The answer to Yeats’s question is ‘nothing’ emanating from the Clutag Press. After a period of reasonable success in mailing into the Republic of Ireland in the post-Brexit disaster era, we have started to have a high proportion of ‘sales’ bounce back inexplicably from Irish Customs. This despite our providing the correct Customs Form correctly completed, or as correctly as served us well until recently. Other EU countries in which we have customers (France, Germany, Denmark) process our packages, on the same information, without issue. But recently the Republic
has seemed to adopt another agenda.

We have always hugely valued our Irish customers in the Republic (and charged them the same for P&P as customers on the island of Britain) and passionately valued Ireland as an exemplary, literary culture. But we can’t sustain anymore the game, or war, of ping-pong Irish Customs have recently re-introduced to proceedings, and so alas we can’t continue to offer our publications to customers in the Irish Republic.

At significant cost, having already borne the cost of postage, we will arrange to reimburse those customers whose orders have been returned to us. If you have been affected we ask you to be patient with us. We’ll be emailing those whose packages have been returned to us, in the coming days, to arrange repayment. We can’t reimburse those still waiting in limbo whose packages have not been returned to us as it remains possible that they will be eventually processed properly.

We apologise to all concerned. The image here is of a package intended for the National Library of Ireland, an order for Archipelago 2:2. This is an invoiced item and so there is no repayment to make, only the postage of £11.70 to bear for a
publication we sell at not much more than that.

Join us for a celebration of writing about place and nature, and the launch of the fifteenth issue of the literary magazine, Archipelago

Tues 7th May, 6.30pm Click here to book for Late Heaney
Nicholas Allen, Late Heaney: Poetry and Place after the Nobel

Weds 8th May, 10am until 6pm Click here to book for Archipelago
The very best of prose, poetry, and song about place and nature of ‘the unnameable
archipelago’, that constellation of islands off the north-west coast of Europe

6.30pm Launch Reception for Archipelago, the 15th issue

PROGRAMME

Old Physics Theatre, Museum of Literature Ireland

Tuesday 7th May

18:30 Welcome Reception

19:00 Nicholas Allen, Late Heaney: Poetry and Place after the Nobel

Wednesday 8th May

10:00 Arrival and Registration

10:15 Opening Words

10:20 Fiona Stafford, Time and Tide

11:05 Tea/Coffee

11:20 The Arc of our Covenant: Alan Riach, Tim Ecott, Angus Macmillan

12:20 James Macdonald Lockhart, Birds of the Archipelago

13:05 Lunch

14:00 Over the Irish Sea: Tony Crowley, Gerry Dawe, Andrew Hadfield

15:00 Readings from Moya Cannon, Garry MacKenzie, Judy O’Kane, David Wheatley

16:00 Tea/Coffee

16:20 Lillis O Laoire, Songs of the Gaelic Coast from the Western Isles to the Blaskets

17:05 Richard Nairn, A Tribute to Michael Viney

17:45 Break

18:30 Drinks Reception and Launch of Archipelago 2:3

Namely, 1 London Bridge Street, LONDON SE1 9GF, as evidenced here:

While this is not unprecedented, it is worth recording, like the passage of a comet through the night sky.

Update:

Another superb new review of Lilliput Press’s Archipelago: A Reader (Edited by Nicholas Allen and Fiona Stafford) by Dan MacCarthy was published on 29th January 2022 in the Irish Examiner. Click here to read the review.

Further press coverage in the Irish Times from Saturday, December 4th 2021  (click on the image or  click here for a more legible version)

Omnium-gatherum

Here to remind you of Lilliput Press’s Archipelago: A Reader, edited by Nicholas Allen and Fiona Stafford, and launched in Convocation House, Divinity School, The Bodleian Library, Oxford, on 10 November, and by Zoom from the Dublin Literary Festival, the next day. Surely, the ideal Christmas present for all those of an archipelagic persuasion. Here’s what M. C. of the Times Literary Supplement  had to say about it:

Deirdre Ni Chonghaile made a landmark/seamark contribution to Archipelago 12, ‘Greim an fhir bháite’ (The grip of the drowned man). It is included in Archipelago: A Reader. Now she has an important new book out from University of Wisconsin Press.

This book is a must for all serious students, and amateurs like myself, of Aran Islands cultural history. I guess that for many, as for me, J. M. Synge’s association with the islands and his musical interest in the people and their practice of Sean-nós singing (unaccompanied ‘old style’ song in Irish) represents just about the most we know about the subject, apart from any experience of contemporary performance on the islands and elsewhere in Connemara.

Ni Chonghaile has previously published an important essay on ‘Synge as Song Collector’ (Irish University Review). The account she now provides in Collecting Music in the Aran Islands is a story on a different scale, and a fascinating one.  Her book deals in detail with four historical collections including the seminal work of Douglas Hyde, most notably his Love Songs of Connacht that had great influence on Synge. It affords vital insights for the non-Irish speaker into what actually went on musically in Ireland, through (and orally, as must be, prior to) the nineteenth- and into the twentieth century, and the world West of the Shannon above all.

What part the practices of collecting and translating played in saving the Irish language is complex, if not impossible, to assess, but current ‘old style’ musical revivalism is strong among a new generation of native Irish language speakers. Without the devoted efforts of the collectors and their translations, however uneven and varied, whatever their understanding of, or ambitions for, what they were doing, all might have been lost on the air into which the songs were sung. There would only be work handed down in the last outposts of oral transmission.

Perhaps the odds are stacked against Ni Chonghaile’s important book reaching the wider readership it deserves. It falls victim to a typical University Press monograph pricing policy that puts it well beyond the means of most readers. Though it must be said that in place of the physical book itself, it is possible to buy access to a digital version. Reading on screen nowadays comes as second nature to many. So we must congratulate UWP warmly for making the work available in both formats, the one far less expensive, if less malleable, than the other.

Another contributor to Issue 12, with a poem in Gaelic, addressed to Rody Gorman, was the polymathic wonder – composer, scholar, poet, Hebridean crofter – John Purser. He has just published a collection of poems (with Kennedy & Boyd, Edinburgh), poems as expressive of their author’s soon-to-be octogenarian joie-de-vivre and generosity spirit as anyone could wish for.

The book’s title This Much Endures derives from a poem in the series of Amoretti, poems of love and celebration, quite un-Spenserian in kind, the most characteristically witty and sharply observed of which, for my money, is no. XXVI ‘Birthday Suit’. There are a good many dedicatory poems here, celebrating friendship, one to our very own Archipelago mainstay, Alan Riach. Fiona Stafford provides an introduction to the book, as perceptive as it is warm-hearted towards this most remarkable human being.

Readers should also pursue Purser’s CD Dreaming of Islands, with its settings of work by Sorley MacLean and by Iain Crichton Smith, and other compositions based on songs from the pìobaireachd tradition. Purser is staggeringly accomplished in many musical forms of making and performance, and a great scholar of the Celtic world too, as may be discovered most readily in his online collaboration with Meg Bateman: Window to the West: Culture and Environment in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd, a veritable treasure trove for the archipelagically minded.