“The Pharoah’s Daughter”: ‘Cuirim no dhóchas ar snamh / im mbáidin teangan / faoi mar a leagfá naíonán / I gcliabhán / a bheath fite fuaite / de dhuilleoga fealastraim … [I place my hope on the water / in this little boat / of the language, the way a body might put an infant / in a basket of intertwined iris leaves …] (Trans. Paul Muldoon; quoted in The Irish Times, 31 May. 2001.]

“The Marianne Faithfull Hairdo”: ‘Having washed their hands of water forever, / they can no longer even have a shower. / They scour the household vessels with a Fairy Liquid purée of ash and urine, / plus a grain of sand thrown in, / and use so much elbow-grease, / you’d have to give it to them, / they finish up like the TV ads. // They exfoliate with oils in attar of rose / and scrub their scalps with a man-made / dry shampoo supplied by Boots, / or ordinary talc. // The few-and-far between times / that they wet a hair of their heads, / it’s with lukewarm tap water. / Which must be applied before sundown / for the following very good reason: // A while back a local woman / was threshing flax with two girl-helpers, / and would only allow them to wash their hair / when the evening shift was over. / The work went on till late in the night, / and since there was no sign of a break, / one of the girls put a flake of ash in her mouth, / the other a pinch of the chaff. // Around midnight there came a knock to the door, / and a voice cried: “Away to hell / with the belly of ash! But spare / the belly of chaff - and straight out the door / with the belly that’s empty!” // The woman of the house and the ash-girl / turned into thin air, / leaving the girl of chaff / to tell the tale: // which has been handed down from that day to this, to put the heart across the breasts of the teenage mermaids.’ (Trans. from Irsih by Medbh McGuckian; quoted on US Navy Academy Irish Literature website - online [defunct 2025].)

“The Mermaid in the Labour Ward”: ‘Something stirred in her not / the swishing meteor of her fin, / but in the pit of the bed, / a body-long split of ice, / languid as dulse tentacles, / flaccid as fishbait. // “Lord Bless Us, isn’t this a hoot - / some kind of Night of the Long Knives - / half a staff as pissed as a newt, / and the rest of them you couldn’t trust / as far as you could throw them. / I’ve had it up to here.” / And she upped and yanked the sea-legs / out the door. // The crunch came / when she found herself / head over heels in their wake: / were these creatures joined to her, / or was she hinged on to them? / It took the nurse / to give her the low-down / and put her in the picture: / “What you have there, dear, / is called a leg, and another one to boot. / First leg, / second leg, / left, right, / one goes in front of the other.” It’s little wonder / in the long months that followed, / as her instep flattened and her arches dropped, / if her mind went with them.’ (Trans. from Irish by Medbh McGuckian; quoted on US Navy Academy Irish Literature website [as above].

‘What Foremothers?’ in Theresa O’Connor, ed., The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers (Florida UP 1996), pp.8-20: “Did you see an old woman go down the path?” “I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.” This image galvanised a whole population at the beginning of this century and is still shockingly alive in the collective psyche for all that an unholy alliance of Marxist-Freudian reductionist intellects may seek to deny it. Eavan Boland is dead right to engage polemically with this image because, as Marina Warner has shown most comprehensively in her book Monuments and Maidens, there is a psychotic splitting involved where, the more the image of woman comes to stand for abstract concepts like justice, liberty, or national sovereignty, the more real women are denigrated and consigned barefoot and pregnant to the kitchen. […] (p.16); If nothing else, the practice of poetry has taught me that there is a psycho-emotio-imagistic dimension to our being, a feeling soul, which has fallen through the interstices of the mind/body polarities of the dominant discourse so that it is become quite literally unspeakable. A whole realm of powerful images exists within us, overlooked by, and cut off from, rational consciousness. This is very dangerous because, if Freud has taught us anything, it foreshadows the inevitable return of the repressed. If these images are not engaged with in playful dialogue, if we do not take them seriously, then they will wreak a terrible revenge by manifesting somatically as illnesses or by being acted out blindly and irrationally, as we see them being acted out at this very moment in the sack of Sarajevo, as ethnic and historic tensions, long brushed under the carpet of a monolithic Marxism, explode to the surface.’ (p.17.)

‘I think in the long run, though, that we are lucky that for one reason or another on this island the door between the nation and this other world has never been locked tight shut. There was always someone - the bard in the hall, the seanchaí by the fireside, or the balladeer in the pub - who kept his foot in the door. Later Ong calls it our “high degree of residual orality” [...]

I love this aspect of our culture. It is one of the main things that drew me back to live here, after seven years on the shughrawn. It is infinitely more exciting and much more of a human challenge to live in a country that is even just intermittently in touch with the irrational than to live in one that has set its face resolutely against it.

But this gift of ours is not without its inherent dangers, one of which is that in the absence of a responsible intelligentsia, this permeability [17] of the collective ego-boundaries can be manoeuvred and choreographed for very dubious purposes. The moving statues is a case in point.’ (p.17).

Irish Language: ‘Irish is a language of enormous elasticity and emotional sensitivity; of quick and hilarious banter and a welter of references both historical and mythological; it is an instrument of imaginative depth and scope, which has been tempered by the community for generations until it can pick up and sing out every hint of emotional modulation that can occur between people. Many international scholars rhapsodize that this speech of ragged peasants seems always on the point of bursting into poetry.’ (‘Why I Chose to Write in Irish: The Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back’, in The New York Times, 8 Jan. 1995.)