There’s a scene in Brian Friel’s iconic play Translations (1980) that seems to me to speak to our current moment.
“I became Seamus eile — Irish for ‘the other Seamus.’ A nice qualifier. Otherhood via brotherhood.”
I have not yet made it to James Joyce’s grave.
I was simply tongue-tied by all that my daughter’s reporting was bearing witness to.
The Given Note’s mournful spirit would certainly have been in the air when the poem was read at Heaney’s funeral.
Thomas O’Grady was born and grew up on Prince Edward Island. He retired in December of 2019 after 35½ years as Director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he was also Professor of English and a member of the Creative Writing faculty. His articles, essays, and reviews on literary and cultural matters have been published in a wide variety of scholarly journals and general-interest magazines, and his poems and short fiction have been published in literary journals and magazines on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border and on both sides of the Atlantic. His two books of poems — What Really Matters and Delivering the News — were published in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.