Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

This little volume of poetry has had a major impact on me. For one thing, the story of its re-birth after so many decades of obscurity reminds me how tenuous poetry is, and how dependant it is on human intervention, for good or ill.

In her memoirs Hope Against Hope Nadezhda Mandelsthtam wrote about how there were many poets’ wives and widows throughout the Soviet Union whose hairs were going white for fear that they might forget one word of their husbands’ poems. Commitment to memory was the only way by which the verses of those whom Stalin considered too dangerous to live could retain their existence, especially when things as fagile as manuscripts were so easily destroyed.

The poems of Faeries Hither! were originally published in 1935, a year in which the dreadful cogs and levers of Stalinist terror were being oiled in preparation for their application. It was the year before those proud defenders of Christianity in Spain wouid launch themselves in alliance with the Nazis against the forces of liberalism and humanity, an endeavour in which they would be aided and abetted by the Catholic hierarchy and laity in Ireland for whom any non-conformity of thought had to be suppressed as quickly as any episcopal jackboot would allow. It is interesting that the book was published not in God’s own country but in London.

It was published in the year before the abdication crisis. Those events were the very partial inspiration for one of my feeble forays into poetry in which I wrote how I maintained my sanity and sense of personal decency in Cavan by each day abdicating from the local ”set up”  dominated at the iime by a sickeningly shallow yet all pervasive pretence worthy of grotesque pantomime, that was at the same time stultifying yet so transparent that it could not suppress the stench of rank corruption emanating from those who sought to preserve it.

 Thankfully those days are more or less over I hope, and these verses are a wonderfully fragrant antidote to them.