The Pop-up Book of Invasions

Fiona Farrell

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781775582021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Offering poems that draw vividly on the landscape, history, and mythology of Ireland—while making connections with her home and childhood—this collection of poems reflects the author's personal journey and the many "invasions" of past and present. She adapts and transforms several ancient Irish texts, rewriting their stories for a contemporary world. 

Marginalia

Poems should stand by themselves – and I hope these do – but when I go to readings I like the asides, just as I like the footnotes in books and the marginal scribblings of an irritable scribe.

The invasion, p. 3. ‘Who was the first to take Ireland after the creation of the world? This is what the Book of Druim Snechta says, that Banba was the name of the first woman who found Ireland before the Flood and that from her Ireland is called “Banba”. With thrice fifty maidens she came and with three men. Forty years were they in the island: thereafter a disease came upon them so that they all died in one week. Afterward Ireland was for 200 years without a living person …

It is there that they came to harbour

the woman-crowd at Dun namBarc

in the Nook of Cessair, in the lands of Carn

on the fifteenth, on a Saturday.’

– The Book of Invasions, Vol. 2

The Way of the Dishes, p. 4. The Burren is a landscape in western Ireland composed of striated limestone, stripped by glaciers to form smoothly contoured hills, bare and grey white – pavlova hills – or expanses of flat stone pavement, cracked in orderly rectangles like huge tiles. I visited it over four days in late winter when the bare bones of the place were particularly compelling. The topographical map marked ‘St Mac Duach’s Bed’, the ‘Servant’s Grave’ and something called ‘The Way of the Dishes’.

I drove along little twisting roads through fog to a gate at the foot of a hill. There were no signs or maps or general interpretative fiddle faddle, just a faint track across the flags that looked like the marks left by the narrow wheels of small carts. There were cattle in the fields but the ground was not pocked by their hooves: the land looks too bare and rocky for farming but the sharp drainage makes it ideal for cattle, especially over winter, and the grass that grows between the pavements is especially rich in nutrients so they fatten well. Between the stones in the deep regular cracks, called ‘scailps’ or ‘grykes’, grow a great variety of plants (600 species have been recorded – the greatest concentration in Ireland) in a unique mix of tundra and Mediterranean varieties. Gentians grow here at sea level alongside orchids and maidenhair fern. I followed the grooves in the limestone to the piles of stone that were the grave of the servant and the saint’s bed at the foot of a cliff: bare branches, wet rock and that stillness you get when the fog is down.

The legend is as it is told in the poem: of a feast that flew from King Guaire’s castle to feed the saint at Easter. On the way home I passed the monastery the king built for the saint near Gort: a ruined complex of church, chapels, living quarters and a high tower, needle-sharp amid a cluster of gravestones with their loving arrangements of brilliantly coloured plastic carnations and ribbons.

Spades, p. 6. Near where I have been living at Donoughmore is the Blarney River valley where for over a hundred years the Monard and Coolowen Ironworks produced the thousands of varieties of shovels and spades required by the Irish market. I like tools: when my parents died, I kept my mother’s washboard and the white stick she used to draw out the clothes from the copper. And I kept a little hand hoe my father made from a piece of wood and some bent iron for scuffing up the weeds between the rows of vegetable seedlings.

The Book of the Dun Cow, p. 7. The Book of the Dun Cow is a compilation of prose and verse in Irish transcribed by monks at the great monastery of Clonmacnoise around AD 1100. It was widely believed that its vellum pages had been cut from the skin of a dun cow, Odhar, who accompanied the founder of the monastery, St Ciaran, when he left home to live the life of a monk. Odhar’s milk sustained the monastery. The saint drew a line on the ground between her and her calf with his staff and thereafter the holy cow licked her calf over the line, but never let it suckle, so that she always had enough milk for her human charges.

After her death, Odhar’s skin remained sacred. Cattle skins were highly regarded as agents of visions up until the eighteenth century in both Ireland and Scotland: there is record of a man who could not sleep because of the fleas in his bedding. He wrapped himself instead in an ox hide he found laid over a chair in his chamber and as a result stayed awake for three days and nights, experiencing visions.

The book, as a relic of the saint and his holy cow, was highly valued. It was, for example, handed over in 1380 as ransom for an O’Donnell prince who had been captured – along with some highly prized chairs – by enemies.

The text contains historical and religious material and the earliest known versions of several famous tales that date from the pre-Christian era, most notably the Táin Bó Cúailgne, the story of how Queen Maeve sent her army on one of the cattle raids that were the noble sport of their era to capture a precious brown bull from the herds owned by the men of Ulster. This story was supposed to have been written by the saint himself on vellum cut from Odhar’s skin.

The winner, p. 8. What did I know before I came to Ireland in the winter of 2006? Very little – though my father called himself Irish and my first husband was a linguist who studied Old Irish. (I saw the moon landing while at a Celtic languages conference in Dublin in 1969.) I had read books by Irish writers, from Joyce to Marian Keyes. From Yeats I knew ‘nine bean rows will I have there’ (we had sung a version of that at school) and ‘a terrible beauty is born’ but nothing of what that beauty might have been, and who was Connolly? Or Pearse?

To travel to Ireland is to fill in the gaps between tags of song or verse. Drive to Dingle and you pass through Castlemaine, humming ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. Or to Tralee, and there is that pale moon rising. Or north, where the Mountains of Mourne are sweeping down to the sea …

The gaps around Yeats’s terrible beauty began to be filled in when I visited Kilmainham Gaol in Easter Week, a sunny blowy day walking over the hilltop above the Liffey. Inside the gaol, the sun and all movement of air vanished, excluded by blocks of damp limestone. There was no signage, just a compelling story told by a guide who could tell a story well, beginning in the chapel where Joseph Plunkett married Grace Gifford on the night before his execution in 1916. A plain room, with an altar and rows of wooden benches. A corridor with its rows of cells each with a single printed name over the door. The stone-breaking yard where they were shot, Connolly tied to a chair for he was too weak from wounds to stand.

Easter 2006 marked the anniversary of their deaths with a military procession down O’Connell Street. To me it looked like all such parades, with too many trucks and not enough bands, and ranks of soldiers marching past the dear leader in his long black overcoat. I felt confused by it, just as I feel confused by the internecine killings and ambushes of the Civil War. And the fact that Ireland remained neutral in 1939–45, a time referred to here as ‘The Emergency’. And that de Valera offered his condolences to the German ambassador on the death of Hitler.

The statue at the foot of O’Connell Street opposite the Post Office has four bronze seated angels with spread wings. The bronze is pierced with bullet holes from a time when right and wrong seemed more straightforward: the enemy has a gun boat on the Liffey and the rebels hold the Post Office. And the song has the last word.

Blow-in, p. 10. Any newcomer to this southwestern part of rural Ireland is a ‘blow-in’.

Following cows, p. 13. The Irish word for road is bóthar, and means ‘cow way’. Country roads wind along old trails, and were designed to accommodate the width of two cows. Cows have been fundamental to Irish life for millennia. Major rivers often have ‘cow’ as part of their name, suggesting their role in nourishing the land just as milk nourished the people. Before the Irish became potato eaters, their basic diet was milk and curds in summer, and butter – preserved in wooden barrels and kept fresh by being buried in bogs – in winter. (The barrels are still found occasionally by peat diggers: a friend tells me he tasted the butter from such a barrel and it was still edible.)

Echo, p. 14. On our first day in Cork I went to get a mobile phone. Cork city is centred on an island (‘Corcaigh’ means ‘marshy’) where the River Lee branches on meeting the sea. The largest street, Patrick Street, was a canal until the eighteenth century. It curves along the length of the island and narrow laneways veer from it at odd angles. It’s confusing at first, especially on a wet afternoon, already getting dark though only 4 o’clock, and there was a strange repetitive echoing call from the corner opposite the Vodafone shop: it took me a while to work out that it was the newspaper man calling out the name of the evening paper, the Echo.

Beckett, p. 16. In summer 2006, Dublin was celebrating Samuel Beckett. At Trinity – where he had once been a student – there was an exhibition of his manuscripts, letters and assorted photographs. Downstairs: The Book of Kells and long queues in the gift shop. Upstairs: the barrel-vaulted Long Room with its cliff faces of leather-bound books, marble busts of eighteenth-century worthies, and the fly-away, flimsy display boards of the exhibition.

Cursing stones, p. 18. Such stones were kept in old churches or other hallowed places. A person who felt they had been wronged would perform some ritual of fasting and prayer, then turn the stones, or employ the person who knew the appropriate words to do so, to bring about retribution. On Inis Mor, sister island to Yeats’s Innisfree on Lough Gill and site of a former bardic school, there is a collection of cursing stones. They are laid on a larger slightly concave rock like the fossilised eggs of some strange and massive bird.

Politics and economics, p. 21. The area round Cork suffered greatly during the Famine. In Donoughmore alone 1400 people died in the winter and spring of 1846–47, including the priest who ministered to the dying. It is common to see road signs reading ‘Famine Graveyard’ pointing off down some muddy lane to a patch of rough ground, walled away from grazing by cattle. At Skibbereen, one of the largest such graveyards lies beside a busy road on the riverbank.

Like over a million others, my ancestors fled the country mid-century, to find work in the jute factories of Dundee. On official documents recording births or marriages or deaths they signed their names with a cross.

Tarmac, p. 22. Ireland in 2006 is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Boosted by euro funds, building is booming. Every town and village sports its subdivision, pink and yellow executive residences spring up overnight in country fields, and coastal properties are changing hands for astronomical figures. Property magazines for the Irish investor appear alongside the girlie magazines at the newsagents. Every Sunday afternoon there are property fairs in hotel foyers, designed to attract the newly rich into buying holiday apartments in Bulgaria, Cyprus, anywhere with a reliable summer and a glimpse of a distant ocean …

The boom is fuelled by returnees: for the first time...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• The invasion
• The Way of the Dishes
• Spades
• The Book of the Dun Cow
• The winner
• Blow-in
• The little girl
• Following cows
• Echo
• The canoe in the National Museum
• Beckett
• Lace
• Cursing stones
• Potatoes
• Politics and economics
• Tarmac
• The Butter Road
• Line
• The News
• The Speckled Book
• Gobnait
• Genealogy
• Sheela-na-gig
• The dogs of Ireland
• Betting
• Gold
• Rolling over
• Ballad
• How I’d take the country
• Midden
• Waving
• Well
• The Lonely Planet visits the dead
• Rail
• Crop
• Lissadell
• Hunting
• The Battler
• Poet, Novelist and above all Patriot
• The brown bull
• Seed
• The flood
• Road
• The long way round
• Hair
• The Hag of Beare
• The Lament of the Nun of Beare
• Dance
• Bed
• The verb ‘to be’
• Daffodils
• Marginalia
• Copyright