The Dawn of Irish Poetry - Ancient Poems Come to Life

ANCIENT POEMS COME TO LIFE

Drogheda Creative Writers

Friday 15th November at 11am.

“They leap into our minds as real people, joyful and hurting, as we listen to their poems, these farmers and ladies, monks and bards, who lived so long ago,” says Roger Hudson of his montage of ancient Irish poems Dawn of Irish Poetry that Drogheda Creative Writers will present.

Taking up President Michael D. Higgins’ challenge that we should celebrate the great tradition of Irish poetry as well as those of music, song and dance, this is an embellished version of the readings at the Drogheda Fleadh Cheoils(2018/2019), when an enchanted audience listened to the oldest vernacular poetry in the world.

They encountered the farmer relieved that the storm means no fear of a Viking raid tonight, the aging court beauty lamenting her lost looks, the monk worried for his eternal soul as his mind wanders during mass and their infectious love of nature. Long dead but so real.

For this session, Drogheda Creative Writers start with the Song of Amergin dating back, some think, to 1500BC, the time of the invasion of the Milesians as recorded in the Book of Invasions. Myth or reality? If true, Amergin was the first ever poet on Irish soil and the first named poet in Western Europe. More than appropriate for he is reputed to be buried under Millmount, closeby in Drogheda, at the centre of the territory of which he was chieftain.

A vernacular literature in the language of the ordinary people developed after him, passed on by word of mouth until it was written down by the early Christian monks in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, largely destroyed by the Vikings in the 8th. and rescued again in the 11th century by a new generation of monks and scribes to surprise us afresh today. We owe the excellent translations to German-American scholar Kuno Meyer.

Reading the poems are: guest, actor John Kelly and Marian Clarke, Brian Quinn, and Roger Hudson. Featured poet Marie MacSweeney will read from The Lament for Art O’Leary by Eileen O’Leary in the original and her own translation. Drogheda Creative Writers will read the work of poets from the Irish tradition from Blind Raftery and Brian Merriman’s The Midnight Court.

Tea, coffee, and biscuits are served on arrival.

Host or Publisher Highlanes Gallery