Material on these pages comprise a commonplace record of the author’s best-known writings in prose and verse to be met in articles, reviews, monographs & essays including a wide range of monographs, articles, post-graduate dissertations and student essays. The resultant compilation is a scholar’s notebook and not a publication. Visitors to these pages are strongly encouraged to check original texts before quotinBg material cited herein, as stated in the “Terms & Conditions”.

You’ll understand I draw the line
At being robbed of what is mine,
My patris, my deep design
To be at home
In my own place and dwell within
Its proper name.’

[...]
So now, as a thank-offering for one
Whose long wait on the shaded bank has ended,
I arrive with my bunch of stalks and silvered heads
Like tapers that won’t dim
As her earthlight breaks and we gather round
Talking baby talk.

[...]

IV
Had I sufficient Irish in Rannafast
In 1953 to understand
The seanchas and dinnseanchas,
 
Had not been too young and too shy,
Had even heard the story about Caoilte
Hunting the fawn from Tory to a door
 
In a fairy hill where he wasn’t turned away
But led to a crystal chair on the hill floor
While a girl with golden ringlets harped and sang,
 
Language and longing might have made a leap
Up through that cloud-swabbed air, the horizon lightened
And the far ‘Lake of the Yew Tree’ gleamed.