Cré na Cille

Watched Bob Quinn's film on TG4 in the company of my father, as a fierce gale blew around the house. The venom of the main female role was matched by the wind in the chimney and the squalls against the windows. Found the bitter, cantankerous idiom of Ó Cadhain's folk tedious. Naked spite takes over the underworld and no-one else gets a word in edgeways. Cois Fharraige must have the richest heritage of pejorative terms for people in any language.
{The young Tomás de Bhaldraithe published the early fruits of his lexicographical studies in Béaloideas in the forties, an article on terms for different kinds of person in the Irish of Connemara, most of them pejorative of course.}

50th Birthday

Is this it?

Dear Aidan

We had our staff party last Friday at the Plaza Hotel in Westport. I had to skip the meal because I wanted to go to Paul Durcan's launch of The Laughter of Mothers. There was a full house at Hotel Westport for the reading. Durcan read without prelims or commentary: a set of harrowing, very sad pieces, an anatomy of the life of a woman who gave up her own freedom for husband and family, the regular story of a mid-century Irish mother. Everyone's head was bowed by the end; unrelieved misery. I could have stayed for the drinks and literary chatter, but instead I beat a retreat back to the staff party. A group of us, reborn revellers, ended up in the night club, a cure for gloom.

Letters of Ted Hughes

The Hughes Letters are another magnificent gift from the poet. The writing comes off the pen like molten solder. Some of the formulations are haunting, as when he describes a former teacher whose funeral he attended, who had observed teaching like a religious duty, occasionally visited by the desire to start something different, how the urge flew over him like a great bird, just two or three swoops, and then gone forever.
Hughes wrote vivid letters to his children, and wrote robustly on their behalf to protect them from intrusion.
He was at the heart of the poetry boom of the sixties and seventies, and himself sold tens of thousands of copies. Reading through the times, we can look over his shoulder as he worked on plays, sent off poems, negotiated with editors. We are standing in the workshop of someone committed to full-time to writing, with occasional breaks for fishing and farming. His career, and that of Plath, belong to another era for poets, before teaching creative writing became almost a career norm.
People will continue to have strong views on the personal stories, but whatever their position, the Hughes-Plath nexus has the force of an originating myth and is unavoidable. Partisanship in this affair amounts to a denial of the collaboration between the two and of their shared energies; there are moments in the work of both poets when they speak with the other's voice.