Author: andrew

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.

The Harbour Light

. . . . . . . . . . . .  lowered and lifted –
a canary in a mine-shaft fluttering
guttering but unquenched. Lead kindly
as she wrangles and haggles for passage
through wheeling collisions of light
flashed at death’s threshold, hell’s mouth,
heaven’s gaping gate, the narrow strait
and close scrape, Davy’s Locker and lamp
together, rocky seamark and landmark
vying on a soul’s darkest before the dawn,
gull and gale crying until depth do us part –
glass-eyed cod, haddock, monk, on ice –
the crew, lids propped, dying to turn in,
to drown in sleep until they wake
restless to put out again as much for
the sake of it as for pay’s lean packet.

Weather permitting … and restrictions of every conceivable kind allowing, we’re pleased to tell you we should at last glimpse the Harbour Light in time to bring our catch to market early in the new year. You will allow us, I know, a certain poetic licence in our promises. Just as I know you’ll be happy to hear Davey also, where you read Davy. It’s the nature of the undertaking, and makes sound sense. As to the ‘pay’s lean packet’, it would help the cause if you could place a pre-publication order for Archipelago 2:1, earlier rather than later in the day, through the website. We’ve been lying low for the past couple of years, dependant on income from our diminutive backlist, and our funds are at a low ebb. Do please help boost them by placing an order. It will make all the difference to our efforts and ultimately your pleasure.

Ireland’s leading independent publisher, the Lilliput Press’s Archipelago: A Reader edited by Nicholas Allen and Fiona Stafford is due for publication very shortly. At 578 pages, with a valuable amount of new material, it is a must-buy publication. You can purchase it via the Lilliput website. There you will read Robert Macfarlane’s inspiring endorsement:

Archipelago met and extended my own strong sense, nearly fifteen years ago now, that there was a need to turn the compass-rose of some story-telling and art in Britain and Ireland, away from the south and east and towards the north and west; away from the metropolis and towards rural and littoral margins. Much about McNeillie’s vision for Archipelago appealed to me and to others: its commitment to a paper-only existence; its recognition that no landscape (or seascape) speaks only in one voice — and the hospitality its pages therefore offered to Welsh, Irish and Gaelic-language work; and its wish to bring artists together with writers, and even musicians, to celebrate and commemorate the human and natural cultures of, especially, the Atlantic coasts. It formed an important twist in the braid of what has become known as ‘new nature writing’ in Britain and beyond, it lit up a tradition of coastal place-culture that goes back as far as early Celtic Christian poetry, and I feel fortunate to have been part of its journey.

All the more reason to sign up for the new series. It promises an extended geographical range and more environmentally determined focus while remaining none the less true to its original ground in the unnameable archipelago of Britain and Ireland.

Now the legendary figure of the Skipper is tugging impatiently at my sleeve ‘restless to put out again’, so I say farewell for now, and be sure to fare well.

i.m. Máiréad

After the obituaries, the éloges and sail-shaped remembrances.
After the crowds have left on the boat
and the pollution of their footfall dies away with the evening.
After autumn’s equinox begins the purer dream of winter –
that’s when to settle in to work and when I’ve thought of you
most often, in the capital of monochrome, at Fearann an Choirce,
in your storm-walled house with its empty window-frame,
overlooking the west. And after all now, I find myself
thinking of you all the time – bald, and silent as a Buddha
as you’ve become, staring from a photo on my wall,
from the night we first met, as we’ll never meet again,
to enjoy our squawks, in honour of the sgarbh and the Rock.
The last wise man gone, another ghost in the ranks up there,
gathered with Thoreau and Melville, to watch below
worst fears for Earth and humankind come true,
in our wireless shapeless world, bound by the heptagonal sea,
as the covid strikes us down, as, bitter irony of ironies,
it struck you; and puts us in our place as we deserve,
to rethink our time in space, and dwell on who knows what to come?

Andrew McNeillie

Tim was a visionary genius and an unacknowledged legislator in the making of ARCHIPELAGO, in which he appeared only three times. His commitments to completing the Connemara Trilogy were too compelling for him to think about anything else. When he was done with that enormous labour he was tired of topographical writing and wanted to write more experimentally, somewhat in the spirit of his book My Time in Space. See ‘The Seanachaí and the Database’(Archipelago 7),’The Gods of the Neale’ (Archipelago 9), ‘The Centre of Gravity’ (Archipelago 10).

Tim died of the Covid 19 virus. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for quite a while. His wife, inspiration and collaborator Máiréiad had died two weeks before. She too had been seriously unwell for some time. When I say her name I have one memory of her that always springs to mind at once. I’d been visiting them in Roundstone, and after breakfast, on a sunny morning, walked with Máiréiad in the sea-garden there. The waves lapped on the rocks just a short step away, the sun sparkling in them. She told me about her current reading. Her studies in Greek were another intense preoccupation. She was a most voracious reader, and a serious self-schooled language student, fluent in a number of languages, including of course Irish. Suddenly she started speaking in Greek. It is a most extraordinary noise to hear anywhere, but by the sea, with many small islands nearby, it seems preternatural. Or so it did that morning. I didn’t know it until she was done, but she was declaiming the opening to the Oresteian trilogy of Aeschylus. It felt like an epiphany of some kind, something out of this world. Now they are both out of this world and it is the greatest personal loss and to our community.

Since Archipelago 12 sailed into the world, we’ve all been stood down, though the wheelhouse is still spinning in its wake and beside itself. I gave the Tannahill Lecture at Glasgow University in February: ‘Theatres in the Round’, about islands, from Inis Mór to Whalsay, and their lives, in print, in image, and in themselves. The lecture was subsequently edited into five parts and published in the culture pages of the Scottish daily the National – a fine institution, very much of the times, proud to be dismissed by the quisling Michael Gove as ‘The worst newspaper in the world.’ Meanwhile Brexit glooms over Scotland

the latest cauchemar out of England.
Send it home to think again:
Enlightened Scotland must Remain,
by auld alliance, European . . .

as our resident ballad singer puts it.

‘Creach is iomairt’ – foray and turmoil – from Seeker Reaper by George Campbell Hay.

‘Light Years Ahead’ Richard Murphy’s True Light about to leave the planet.

And I was in Dublin for a discussion on Richard Murphy at Trinity College and helping launch Ben Keatinge’s collection Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy published by Cork University Press, an essential purchase for anyone devoted to Murphy’s lore.

It would all have been marvellous if the number 13 hadn’t kept on flashing before my eyes, like a neon tube on the blink. A symptom even a few days on Inis Mór in October couldn’t banish. As you see, for therapy, I’ve been indulging in some daubing with my painting and decorating kit. Who knows where, when or how it will all end.

Otherwise, I write to remind you that Crexmas is coming and the Corncrake’s getting fat. Time to solve some gift headaches while stocks last.

Night-Snow

wee song for Sydney Graham

The real poem never ends.
The blizzard beneath its last footprint
is where we search in its memory,
the blizzard that is also night
as fresh on your face as snow.

Night-snow the ultimate
a body must weather, body I say,
but I mean soul
out on the manhole sea
where the littoral-minded sail

beyond Cape Metaphor to be.
And Sydney Coastguard keeps his watch
ticking on course for Greenock,
with Alfred Wallis at the wheel
aboard the good wreck Alba.

For who but a blind one can’t see
Scotland from Cornwall? –
every small hour of the year
with the heart in the right direction
and a glass to his eye.

In 2008 the above poem appeared in the Scottish Review of Books. Ten years on it was anthologised in The Caught Habits of Language : An Entertainment for W. S. Graham for Him Having Reached One Hundred edited by Rachael Boast and company. As if all that weren’t honour enough for it, the other day I received the image below from Mike McDonnell, a retired medical man originally from Greenock, now living in the Shetlands, asking my permission to make some use of the poem in the artwork below.

This image is part of an extraordinary series, soon to form an exhibition, as advertised in the poster here. It is just the kind of occasion Archipelago readers are likely to enjoy. I hope to be able to make it to the opening night. See you there . . .