Richard Murphy was not just a friend of Archipelago and of the Clutag Press. Through his first collection of poems Sailing to an Island (1963), he was a key figure in the history of the entire venture, a founding father in what we might call the archipelagic turn, taken so notably also by Norman Ackroyd and by Tim and Mairead Robinson. Andrew McNeillie’s An Aran Keening (2001), given him by Bernard and Heather O’Donoghue, was he wrote in June 2016 ‘the last prose work I have read from cover to cover with joy all the way’ and on its author’s birthday 12 August that year ‘What a good decision you made at the age of 22, it seems to me,…