Pàdraig Macaoidh

Pàdraig Macaoidh is a native Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Lewis. His pamphlet offers poems in English, including the title poem, and in Gaelic, for which en face English versions are provided by the author, and in one instance by Ciaran Carson. Together the poems redouble the otherness of their title, playing brilliantly on the cultural ironies that accrue when an ancient language faces up to and bears down upon a world (a colonial politics), that has for centuries conspired with all its might to silence it…