July 16, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg tr. Dick Davis

essays on parenting italian literature women in translation memoir

The Little Virtues is a collection of 11 short essays by the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg, written between 1944 and 1960, originally published in 1962 as Le Piccole Virtú.

Some of the reflections were previously published in Italian newspapers and magazines. Being spread over twenty years, they span her life post-war from her late twenties until her mid 40’s, through motherhood, widowhood and her growth as a writer.

They capture reflections on life in different places she lived and visited, like the Italian countryside where she and her husband spent time while Italy was under fascist rule, to her visits to London, which she can’t help but see through a critical cultural lens and the more accepting memories of Rome and Turin.

In a way, these essays are more revealing of the character of Ginzburg than Family Lexicon (my review) her autobiography, in which she plays a lesser role to that of the greater family, one overshadowed by an opinionated father. The youngest in the family, a quiet observer and astute note-taker, Natalia once out of the shadow of that household, finds her voice and unique style, seen changing from the bucolic monotony of an Abruzzi winter, the last season of wonder before the terrible death of her husband at the age of 34 years in Rome, to her more confident final essay on those little virtues and the education of children.

An Italian Voice of Note Rediscovered

Natalia Ginzburg Italian literature Family Lexicon

Natalia Ginzburg wrote dozens of essays, plays, short stories and novels, including Voices in the Evening, All Our Yesterdays and the autobiographical Family Lexicon, for which she was awarded the prestigious Strega Prize in 1963.

Though popular in Italy, her work was under the radar in the UK, until Daunt Books reissued this 1962 collection of essays and her autobiography, and subsequently her novels.

Her work explored family relationships, politics and philosophy during and after the Fascist years, World War II. Modest and intensely reserved, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history, whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside or contemporary Rome—approaching those traumas indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life.

She was involved in political activism throughout her life and served in the Italian parliament between 1983 to 1987. Animated by a profound sense of justice, she engaged with passion in various humanitarian issues, such as the lowering of the price of bread, support for Palestinian children, legal assistance for rape victims and reform of adoption laws.

She died in Rome in 1991 at the age of seventy-five.

Notes and Quotes From A Few Essays

I read this collection back in April, as a group read, always enjoying the knowledge that others are reading the same book at the same time and sharing their feedback. I had a bit of a lull in posting reviews as I was working on another writing project, but I kept a few notes and quotes, that I’ll share here, that give a flavour of the collection.

Winter in the Abruzzi (1944) and Worn Out Shoes (1945)

It’s hard not to read these essays without considering the context, that time in Abruzzi before her husband made a prisoner of war by the Nazi’s, not knowing the beauty of that exile, these essays published in the wake of his death in February 1944. That significant absence in some way replaced by her dedication to writing and her three young children.

There is a kind of uniform monotony in the fate of man. Our lives unfold according to ancient, unchangeable laws, according to an invariable and ancient rhythm. Our dreams are never realised and as soon as we see them betrayed we realise that the intensest joys of our life have nothing to do with reality. No sooner do we see them betrayed than we are consumed with regret for the time when they glowed within us. And in this succession of hopes and regrets our life slips by.

On England, Eulogy & Lament (1960, 1961)

Eulogy and Lament (1961) is an interesting observation of cultural and geographic differences seen from the author’s Italian perspective. Some are poignant, like a tree in blossom on a street that reveals a precise plan versus the memory of a surprising random tree in Italy. Others tell of a sense of melancholy, sadness, conventionality, lack of surprise, desolation. A lack of the familiar, present in Italy, that kind of impression that one often hears from anyone visiting another country for the first time, a heightened sense of difference, of what is missing.

A timid person stays timid, an unsociable person stays unsociable. And over this initial timidity and unsociableness spreads the great, English melancholy, like an endless moor in which the eyes can find no landmark.

La Maison Volpé (1960): An abandoned place in London that doesn’t reveal its past, so the author imagines what it might have been and remembers other places that offer temptation, yet disappoint within. Of restaurants, food, lack of inspiration.

I have a feeling that when I remember London and the time I have spent here, those syllables will echo in my ear, and all London will be summed up for me in that Parisian name.

Human Relationships

Portrait of a Friend (1957) is a beautiful, sad, reflection and honour to their friend from Turin, the poet and translator Cesare Pavese, who took his own life in 1950.

And now it occurs to us that our city resembles the friend whom we have lost and who loved it; it is, as he was, industrious, stamped with a frown of stubborn, feverish activity; and it is simultaneously listless and inclined to spend its time idly dreaming. Wherever we go in the city that resembles him we feel that our friend lives again; on every corner and at every turning it seems that we could see his tall figure in its dark half-belted coat, his face hidden by the collar, his hat pulled down over his eyes.

He and I (1962): to me this reads as a portrait of an ill-fitted relationship. A collection of characteristics of two opposite people that shows their interests and lack of, and how they manage them. She relents, he insists. He travels, she follows. He gets what he wants, she compromises. A singular memory of a conversation long ago. An ironic portrayal of a second marriage that leaves a bitter taste.

My tidiness and untidiness are full of complicated feelings of regret and sadness. His untidiness is triumphant.

On Writing

My Vocation Contemplating “writing” as the one thing she is truly good at, she recalls how it developed from childhood observations and the earliest stories. The lack inherent in being happy when it comes to writing, how suffering brand mood affect the process. A contempt for the vocation when children enter her life, then the carving out of space and place for it. Transition from wanting to write like a man, the vocation as cruel master, one that has no sympathy.

My vocation has always rejected me, it does not want to know about me. Because this vocation is never a consolation or a way of passing the time. It is not a companion.

The Little Virtues (1960)

“As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one’s neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.”

This is how the essay opens and in it she takes on the little virtues and the great virtues and the effect of authoritarian parenting on the next generation of parents, the relationship to money that causes scarcity consciousness, an invitation to indifference, reward and punishment, homework and daydreaming, resisting hope and embracing what is, a balance between silence and words.

“And if we ourselves have a vocation, if we have not betrayed it, if over the years we have continued to love it, to serve it passionately, we are able to keep all sense of ownership out of our love for our children. But if on the other hand we do not have a vocation, or if we have abandoned it or betrayed it out of cynicism or a fear of life, or because of mistaken parental love, or because of some little virtue that exists within us, then we cling to our children as a shipwrecked mariner clings to a tree trunk.”

Overall, it is a remarkable collection that drops in on these passages of time throughout those two decades, showing us a little of how life was, what perceptions were held and charting the growth of an extraordinary writer who thought herself most ordinary.

Reading Women In Translation

August is the annual Women in Translation month, and I have one more novel by Natalia Ginzburg on my shelf, All Our Yesterdays, which I hope to read then.

Do you have a favourite Natalia Ginzburg or any sitting unread on your shelf to read in August? Let us know in the comments below.

March 19, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Fierce Appetites by Elizabeth Boyle

Fierce Appetites is my next read for Reading Ireland Month 2025, a nonfiction title I came across in 2022 when it was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Non Fiction Book of The Year. It didn’t win the award, that went to the excellent book I reviewed here, journalist Sally Hayden’s My Fourth Time We Drowned.

Lessons From My Year of Untamed Thinking

Fierce Appetites Elizabeth Boyle Medieval Irish literature The Táin Bó Cúailnge

Fierce Appetites is a hybrid memoir, written over the year following the death of the author’s father, which gives her cause to reflect on their relationship, her childhood, her role as a parent/mother, her academic profession and some of the decisions she has made over the years, both the well thought out and the impulsive, those she takes some pride in and others she regrets.

The bonds between different members of a family are explored and pondered and found in the ancient texts.

The world has always been full of stepmothers, foster-mothers, fathers who do the ‘mothering’, aunts and cousins and grandparents who take on primary caring responsibilities, adoptive mothers, institutions that rear children (for better or worse), and innumerable kinds of almost-mothers, surrogate mothers, ‘they-were-like-a-mother-to-me’s. I was reared by a stepmother who mothered me as best she could, even when I sometimes believed she was like the mythic wicked stepmother from a fairy tale, and treated her accordingly.

Writings of the Past

Alongside the memoir aspect, written in 12 chapters, months of the years, her reflections lead into a potted introduction to medieval literature, each chapter finding some connection between the personal narrative and something of the medieval history/literature texts that she is reminded of. In fact each chapter is an essay, but I read it more as an interconnected text.

There is a popular misconception that people in the Middle Ages didn’t grieve as much or as deeply as we do today. Perhaps because of the extremely high rates of infant mortality, and images in modern culture of the Middle Ages as a time of endemic warfare, people tend to think that societies became numbed to death. But the medieval literature of grief disproves that claim. People suffered from the loss of their loved ones then just as much as we do now.

Most of this was unfamiliar to me, as it would be to most people unless you had studied it in university, but that was what initially piqued my interest in the book and I found it fascinating to read about all these references and the translations of those texts and how the author demonstrates how they have something relevant to say today if you care to sit with them and interpret/reflect on their meaning or find a connection, which Elizabeth Boyle does so brilliantly.

The things we fight for, and the reasons we fight for them, can be so elusive, so futile, and yet so deeply felt. Every year, I try to explain the emotional complexities of The Táin: From the Irish Epic Táin Bó Cúailnge to a new generation of students: Fer Diad and Cú Chulainn, fighting on opposite sides of a conflict and yet deeply bound by love for each other; Fergus’s divided loyalties; Medb’s myopic willingness to sacrifice her daughter for the sake of a bull.

They tell us through their stories and poems, how people lived, loved, coped and the scale of their imagination, and we reflect on how much things have or haven’t changed. Boyle not only shares her losses, she shares her excesses, yet this is not a transformational memoir, it is raw and unashamedly wicked, just like some of the characters in those ancient texts.

At the mortuary, we had been handed a NHS leaflet on dealing with grief. One of its sensible pieces of advice is not to make any major life changes in the first year of losing someone close to you. In medieval literature, characters are not given self-help pamphlets. When they suffer grief, they destroy mountains, raze kingdoms, tear their hair out and scorch the earth. I just sat numbly at the kitchen table, drinking gin and sending unwise WhatsApp messages to ex-lovers.

History Repeats

The book was written in 2020, which is also interesting because it was a year that gave many the opportunity to pursue projects like this, and also because of the political climate that gets occasionally referenced.

While Boyle lives in Ireland, she often travels to the UK to see her daughter and abroad to speak on her subject of expertise.

One of the main objections to travel in the Middle Ages was that it led to sin.

When she mentions the political situation, she does so from the point of view of a historian, and these points made from five years ago are interesting to reconsider today.

History is full of incremental improvements and revolutionary convulsions – often these are followed by reactionary backlashes in which rights are revoked, inequalities re-established.

There are so many interesting insights and observations, challenges and meandering trains of thought, I highlighted so many and could easily have spent many more hours looking up the references.

Highly Recommended, if you are curious about medieval literature and balancing family, career and personal interests.

Author, Elizabeth Boyle

Elizabeth Boyle was born in Dublin, grew up in Suffolk and returned to live in Dublin in 2013. She is a medieval historian specialising in the intellectual, literary and religious culture of Ireland and Britain. A former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge, she now works in the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University, where she was Head of Department for five years until 2020.

Fierce Appetites is her debut collection of personal essays and was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Non Fiction Book of the Year 2022.

Reading Ireland Month 2025 Best Irish literature

July 13, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Cairn (2024) by Kathleen Jamie

A Poet Writing Nature Essays

Kathleen Jamie is a poet and writer of creative nonfiction about nature. She has written three wonderful collections that I have adored. Findings (2005), my favourite, included essays about the Hebridean and Orkney Islands near her home in Fife and Peregrines nesting; Sightlines (2012) covers a fascinating archaeological dig, tales of more birds on lonely, windswept islands and a visit to the Arctic and finally Surfacing (2019) which I review here in Surfacing 1 and Surfacing 2.

Making Ripples at 60

creative non fiction essays poetry by Scottish poet and nature writer Kathleen Jamie

In Cairn, we find a collection of writings, fragments, observations and memories. Sometimes an individual observation and other times a collective witnessing of changes in the local environment. Of migratory patterns disrupted, of things once common on the horizon, now departed.

As she arrives at her 60th year, she begins to ask different questions, about the next generation and the one after that, if there will indeed be one as children question whether to bring another generation into this vastly changing world.

There is less a note of wonder and more a tone of trepidation at the precarious situation of the natural world and those being born into what will continue after we have left.

The Bass Rock and Bird Flu

It’s a while since we could turn to the natural world for reassurance, since we could map our individual lives against the eternal cycles of the seasons, our griefs against the consolation of birds, the hills. Instead there’s the sense that things are breaking, cracking like a parched field. There they are, the seabird people, among their beloved birds at the height of the breeding season, wearing hazmat suits as they pile corpses into bin bags.

Like a cairn, these short prose pieces are markers, memories, memorials or perhaps even metaphorical or literary burial mounds, tracking the thoughts and observations of an observer over the years of the natural environment, of change in both the natural surroundings and humanity. Testimonies.

‘Stones propose another sense of time, whereby the past, the deep past of the plant, proffers a meagre yet massive support to acts of human resistance…’ John Berger

A thought-provoking collection.

Author, Kathleen Jamie

Kathleen Jamie is one of Britain’s foremost writers. In 2021 she was appointed Makar, Scotland’s national poet.

Jamie resists being identified solely as a Scottish poet, a woman writer, or a nature poet. Instead, she aims for her poetry to “provide a sort of connective tissue”. Influenced by Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, John Clare, and Annie Dillard, Jamie writes musical poems that attend to the intersection of landscape, history, gender, and language.

Her groundbreaking works of prose – Findings (2005), Sightlines (2012) and Surfacing (2019) – are considered pioneers and exemplars of new nature writing. She lives in Fife.

March 29, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

In Ordinary Time, Fragments of a Family History by Carmel McMahon #ReadingIrelandMonth24

In Ordinary Time is one of those wonderful finds, when a number of your own disparate interests collide and someone has managed to put together a work that spans years, across two countries, reflecting on different events in their own life and the background of a country and culture’s history, with these continuous threads running through it, that make it almost seamless.

In a hybrid memoir, Carmel McMahon has written fragments of a family history, structuring them into four parts of three chapters, beginning with Part One: Imbolc: February, The Feast of Saint Brigid and ending in Part Four Samhain: January, Notes on A Return where the story comes full circle.

There are 21 black and white illustrations scattered throughout the text, ordinary photos that amplify the message and create a sense of travel through time. I looked back at the index page for each photo and scribbled my penciled note underneath it, such was the joy of words meeting image.

Full circle feels appropriate to describe a work that despite that linear structure of months and parts, is not that. Rather, it represents points on the spiral of life that goes through cycles; repeating cycles, short cycles, long cycles, interconnected and intergenerational cycles.

Each of the events that she describes in her family history have a shadow history in the culture and while she reflects on her own situation, she finds resonance in the voices of others who have gone before, in particular those whose story we might not have heard, or if we have, might not have been aware of the full picture.

Her story begins somewhere in the middle of her own self-imposed exile, living in New York City. It voyages through her experience with addiction, denial and recovery and ends with the heroine’s return, the learning and this book.

The city had not yet woken on the frigid Sunday morning of February 20, 2011, when the body of a young Irish woman was found outside St. Brigid’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village. The news reports cited alcoholism, homelessness, and hypothermia as contributing factors in her death. They said that earlier that month, on St. Brigid’s feast day she had turned thirty-five years old. They said she wanted to be an artist. They said her name was Grace Farrell.

She questions whether it begins here, or in 1937 when the new Irish state ratified its constitution to reflect a strengthened church-state partnership, that would have a devastating effect on thousands of lives of girls and women and their children, and the unborn future generations who might inherit that affected DNA. All those sent to the Magdalene laundries.

In 1966, her mother would live a version of the shame that surrounded pregnancy out of wedlock, managing to avoid institutional incarceration by disappearing for a while.

Women and children were not afforded the rights of citizenship, of subjecthood, of being. They lived under threat of being erased, hidden, buried. This is why my mother tells me – halting, hesitating – that in her day it was the worst thing in the world for a girl to find herself pregnant, but worse still was for her to talk about it.

That first sister Michelle, born in London, would be knocked down outside her primary school, three months before Carmel was born. Six more children arrived after her and Michelle’s name was never spoken in their house. The legacy of silence she had been born into continued, was passed on, but not forgotten.

Or did the story begin when she had her first drink at the age of ten, at a family gathering? Feelings of inferiority and shame, dulled by the dregs of the adults drinks that replaced that unwanted feeling with one of warmth, of a circle of golden light.

McMahon left Ireland in the 1990’s and did not return permanently until the pandemic era, 2021. Ironically, it seems to this reader, the return has allowed the distance to reflect on the journey and the learning and to piece the interconnectivity of so many people’s lives past, present and future into this text.

Science has proven and is now able to show how stress and trauma can be passed on biologically from one generation to the next, we read.

We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, “narratives, actions and symptoms.” The stories we tell and don’t tell, the actions we take and don’t take, the symptoms expressed by a mother holding the trauma tightly to herself, because she refused to burden her children with it.

Listening to the podcast On Being, she hears Dr. Rachel Yehuda reminds listeners that:

…we are not in biological prison: experiences and events in our environment can also make positive changes to our programming. We can consciously move towards healing.

These intertwined fragments thus reveal the events, experiences and the slow realisation of all that is working on her, the understanding and the aspects that will aid the healing.

Photo by Jessie Crettenden on Pexels.com

There are the endless jobs she tries to hold down, while numbing herself nightly; the visits back home precipitated by tragedy, the road trip across America, an escape that brings her closer to understanding loss and aloneness.

The industrial ghost towns, the late spring rain, the wide, low skies. The old sadness rising. An excess of black bile, they used to say, made the melancholic personality. Freud said that mourning and melancholia are akin in that they are both responses to loss. Mourning is a conscious and healthy response to the loss of a love object. Melancholia is more complicated. It operates on a subconscious level. All the feelings of loss are present, but for what? The melancholic cannot say. This, Freud says, is a pathology.

McMahon reads and shares anecdotes and reflections on the lives of other women who immigrated before her; the young Irish immigrant Maeve Brennan who was a staff writer at the New Yorker before the disease of alcoholism colonized her life; Mary Smith, one of many Irish women used for gynecological experiments in New York hospitals in the mid nineteenth century; Grace Farrell.

After a family tragedy, she reads Anne Carson’s Nox, a book of poems created from the notebook she recorded memories and impressions of her brother, in the decade after he died.

She did this, she tells us, because a brother does not end. He goes on.

She reflects on the Famine, on the role of church and state, on the complicit silences and forgetting, on the advances that were made at the expense of the vulnerable, the now removed statues, the little known memorials of the unnamed. She acknowledges the collective impact of a nation’s traumas on individuals and families with brief insights (her own and Carl Jung’s) into a way forward, towards speaking up, sharing stories, creating meaning, allowing space for healing, for moving towards the light, to enable the passing on of a lighter legacy to future generations.

Sharing her story is part of that, not just for the writer herself, but for those who might find resonance in her journey, towards their own. And to remember the forgotten, the ordinary women like Mary Smith.

I could not put this book down, despite wishing to make it last. Though it is a collection of essays, some of which have been previously published, the threads that run through it make it read like a memoir, perfectly balancing the personal stories with the background history, questioning the effect of both on a young woman’s psyche.

Highly Recommended.

Carmel Mc Mahon, Author

Carmel Mc Mahon grew up in County Meath, and lived in New York City from 1993 – 2021, when she returned with her partner to renovate a house on Ireland’s west coast.

A graduate of CUNY, her writing has been published in the Irish Times, Humanities Review, Roanoke Review, Longreads and shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Award.

January 2, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

A Horse at Night, On Writing (2022) by Amina Cain

I came across this author as she is one of the many quoted in Kerri Ni Dochartaigh’s Cacophony of Bone and it fits with that book, in that it is a kind of journal presented as short essays or fragments on writing, of thoughts that occur while reading other writers’ works.

The chapters have no headings but the book has a contents page that displays from five up to nine words of the first sentence of that fragment/chapter/essay. So the first one begins:

Without planning it, I wrote a diary of sorts…

Through a Window of Words, I See

A number of them begin with referencing the work of an author/artist whose sentences or themes or art provoke her reflections, in particular Elena Ferrante, Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Duras, Rachel Cusk, Marie NDiaye. In contemplating Ernaux’s The Possession, she wonders what it is she loved exactly, alighting on its urgency, the way the narrator is taken over by something – an aspect that is often present in Ferrante’s novels.

In The Lost Daughter, when Leda goes alone…

One she refers to often The Lost Daughter, the story of a woman whose daughters are absent for the summer, she takes a holiday, not thinking of her daughters,

Introspection, Projection, Finding Direction

This leads into Cain’s contemplation of the way humans project on to other things (like the sea) and people and how the act of writing encourages this. She asks why we project at all and delves into that occupation of mind with scalpel-like precision.

She reads the diaries of Virgina Woolf, which cause her to recall 30 years of diaries of an Aunt, one entry telling her that she ‘began to keep a diary because she saw that life had mystical qualities.’

Writing about authenticity gives rise to reflections on Jean Gent’s play, The Maids and Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite and the effect of maintaining roles, when mixed classes live under the same roof.

To have to maintain those class roles always, especially if they are enforced with any kind of degradation, is a violation of the sacredness of one’s life, and a violence all of its own.

The Feline Interruptor

Much of it was written during the pandemic, a period that encouraged introspection and in which humans didn’t always have other humans for company, after reflecting on solitude and the need for human connection and company, other creatures gain notoriety eliciting a chapter that begins:

As I write this my cat Trout whines loudly

It makes me wonder what phrase from this book Kerri Ni Dochartaigh made it into her own; I admit I didn’t have quite the same response on finishing it.

“Astounding…I was distraught when I finished.”

I found it more of an intriguing insight into the varied way writers analyse and respond to each other’s work. I related more to Aysegül Savas‘s blurb.

“Like light from a candle in the evening; intimate, pleasurable, and full of wonder.”

Rather than look at plot, character, dialogue or conflict, these reflections she describes as paying attention to the ‘accessories’, like animals, phrases that create a feeling of relaxation, pondering friendship, or the self. Even plants.

It’s something like finding meaning in other works, that intersects with where the reader/writer is on their own journey, whether that is life or a fictional landscape they are trying to create, looking for lessons that might lie between the lines of others who have gone before, whose words have elicited a response in that reader.

And we, the reader of this book, look through the window of another reader looking through the window of a writer looking at the world.

Author, Amina Cain

Amina Memory Cain is the author of the novel Indelicacy, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and staff pick at the Paris Review, finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Centre for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

She is also the author of two collections of short stories. Her writing has appeared in Granta, the Paris Review Daily and other places.

She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.

January 1, 2024 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Redemption Ground, Essays and Adventures by Lorna Goodison

A mix of memoir, poetry, life adventure and epiphanies, I loved this collection by Jamaican writer Lorna Goodison.

Bonding With the Irish Over Tea & Poetry

essays memoir creative nonfiction Jamaican literature

The opening essay ‘The Song of the Banana Man’ and ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ totally sets the scene for the rest of the book. It is an anecdotal story of the author and her friend, excited to be in London, overhearing two ‘bobbies’ (policemen) talk about a cafe they were just passing, in a way that lured them inside.

‘Whassis then, a new tea ‘ole?’

Their schooling in Kingston, Jamaica had been heavy on all things British and European, so entering this establishment was something related to that indirect familiarity. They encounter three boys from Ireland, who ask if they are from the West Indies and they begin to banter, drinking toasts to the colonial experience, singing songs and reciting poetry.

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
folk dance like a wave of the sea;

The poems they chose were about ordinary people, sure of themselves, of what they did, grounding words shared by these young people, whose paths have crossed, starting out on their own journeys. The exchange lasts while they’re having their tea and comes to a natural end, upon which they part ways. The author is at the beginning of her life journey, but the lines recited by them all have staying power.

And I was not sure where I belonged or what my own purpose was in life back then…. But listening to those three Irish men recite ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ that afternoon, maybe I’d thought yes, that’s what I’d like to be, someone whose artistry makes people dance like a wave of the sea.

A Working Class Teen Dares to Do Better

In, A Taste of Honey, she recounts the experience of seeing a movie in 1963, adapted from the play created by Shelagh Delaney (who was 18 years old when she wrote it) that moves her, that is a moment of epiphany. Being one of nine children, she relished the opportunity to go and see the film one Saturday afternoon alone.

Shelagh Delaney went to a play that she found boring, pretentious and condescending, and said to herself I can do better than that, and went home and wrote A Taste of Honey.

The film would win a BAFTA award.

A Taste of Honey showed working-class women from a working-class woman’s point of view, had a gay man as a central and sympathetic figure, and a black character who was neither idealised nor a racial stereotype. – extract from The Guardian by Dennis Barker

Goodison reflects on why she was so moved by this film, how it gave her some of her life and writing purpose and inspiration.

Shelagh was pronounced ‘ineducable’, but was able to produce work that affected me so deeply that I ended up sitting alone in a cinema after everyone else had filed out, trying hard to compose myself enough to go outside and face a world where most people would not understand why a simple thing like a Saturday afternoon matinee could make me weep as if a close friend or relative had died.

The Daffodil Drama

Writing poetry from a young age, in ‘Some poems that made me’ we read more of this early education and a different take on Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, aka ‘The Daffodils’ poem, after she researches his childhood and life and decides to give the poet a break. See my review Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid for another reference to the daffodil drama.

Over the years I have said quite a lot about this poem, as have other writers throughout the British Commonwealth who have come to regard it as the ultimate anthem to British colonial oppression.

She will encounter may poets and poems until she arrives at the one voice that cause her to stop reading everyone else and just read his poems. In the work of Derek Walcott, who would become a friend and mentor, she found poem as a source of hope and consolation; poem as a lifeboat, anchor and safe harbour.

As she begins to think of her own place in the world, she seeks out women poets, finding nourishment in the work of Gwendolyn Brooks and other African-American fiction writers, while still searching for poetry by Caribbean women, ultimately ending up writing the poems she wanted to read and finding the right language to express them.

I learnt early in my life as a writer that if I wanted to write about my people I had to learn to listen carefully to family stories then imagine, and constantly reimagine those stories…All writer’s do this, but Caribbean writers face formidable or particular challenges because of the ways in which slavery, and then colonialism, erased or distorted so much of our lives that we have to learn to writer ourselves into the story in any way we can.

Tributes to the Mothers & Imagination

We read ‘Guinea Woman’ the poem she wrote trying to imagine a woman she had never met, her great grandmother, an elegy for her mother Doris ‘After the Green Gown of My Mother Gone Down’, and another poem entitled ‘Bedspread’ inspired by news of the home of Winnie Mandela being raided by police, where they seize personal effects including a bedspread, taken because it was in the colours of the African National Congress.

The collection takes the reader to different countries and places on her journeying, sharing both fun and pivotal moments, stories of redemption, of good souls that come to set the indebted free, of her own life crisis in New York, that preceded a change in direction, acting on a promise to herself.

A Musical Accompaniment

Like my reading experience of Bernice McFadden’s excellent The Book of Harlan, whenever Lorna Goodison mentions music, like in the vignette ‘A Part for Tarquin’, I look it up and listen while reading. This one is about her friend Bernard dragging her along to a non-party that she doesn’t wish to attend, and ends with them listening into the night to the pianist Wynton Kelly playing the Miles Davis sextet Some Day My Prince Will Come.

That was the night I began to really appreciate the genius of the Jamaican-American pianist Wynton Kelly, about whom Miles himself was supposed to have said, ‘Wynton is the light for the cigarette; without him there is no smoking.’ That night I realised that if hope has a sound it would be Wynton Kelly’s piano-playing. His hope notes were like sunbeams on the morning waves coming in at Bluefields beach.

Loved it all.

Author, Poet, Essayist, Lorna Goodison

Caribbean poet Lorna Goodison was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1947. A painter before she turned her focus to poetry, Goodison was educated at the Jamaica School of Art and the School of the Art Students League in New York. She was appointed poet laureate of Jamaica from 2017 – 2020. In 2018, she received a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize, and in 2019, she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Her numerous poetry collections include Collected Poems (2017), Supplying Salt and Light (2013), Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems (2006), Controlling the Silver (2005), Traveling Mercies (2001), Heartease (1988), and Tamarind Season (1980).

She is the author of the short story collections By Love Possessed (2011), Fool-fool Rose is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah (2005), and Baby Mother and the King of Swords (1990), and the memoir From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007), which won the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

In 2019, she published Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures.

Professor of English and of Afroamerican & African Studies at the University of Michigan, Goodison divides her time between Toronto and the north coast of Jamaica.

Goodison’s image-rich and socially- and historically-engaged poems often inhabit the lives and landscapes of her Jamaican homeland. “I suspect that I might always write about Jamaica,” Goodison stated in an interview with Mosaic: Literary Arts of the Diaspora. Goodison also discussed the humor in her work, noting, “Jamaicans are very comical people, and laughter is a way of coping with life’s displeasures. Also, when you make something of it [a hard situation], it says that you are in control. There are incidences when we have no control; all we can do is make some sort of a gesture. Sometimes, the world can throw things at you that are so cruel and so devastating that you are in no position to have any kind of real response but to make a gesture. And I think that sometimes laughter is a gesture saying that you have not completely annihilated me; you have not robbed me of my ability to respond as a human being.”

Noting that Goodison often “complements her careful observation of the physical world and her fine eye for detail with a tense, lean, elliptical style” in a review of Supplying Salt and Light, Jim Hannan observed, “At their best, Lorna Goodison’s poems observe the unsavory in history and society even as they guide us firmly toward sources of redemption. With compassion and empathy, Goodison writes about human failure and triumph in large and small measures.”

November 30, 2023 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Seeing For Ourselves and Even Stranger Possibilities by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

Essays, Prose and a Play on Seeing

I first came across the writer Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan in 2021, she wrote the opening essay ‘I Am Not An Answer, I Am The Question’ in Cut From The Same Cloth? – Muslim Women on Life in Britain edited by Sabeena Akhtar. Her essay was about the understanding she came to while a student at the University of Cambridge where she encountered a tool for attempting to ‘unlearn’: questioning.

I realised that most feminist and anti-racist politics I had engaged with up until that point were shallowly asking the wrong questions. Most of the questions being asked were not my questions at all. So much of my educational and consciousness-raising work had been the work of answering questions posed by others.

Her book Seeing For Ourselves and Even Stranger Possibilities is an extension to the understanding she shared in that initial essay.

It is interesting to read the opening pages where she is grappling with her purpose for writing and how to begin this book, having just finished reading Annie Ernaux’s nobel lecture, where she reaches back sixty years to a diary entry and finds her opening line (her purpose for writing), in the words ‘j’écrirai pour venger ma race’ (I will write to avenge my people).

Manzoor-Khan writes about ‘the gaze of the other’ and questions whether she has anything to add to a complex and much discussed subject and finds out she does when she turns the topic on its head.

Ernaux was writing from the perspective of a higher educated French working class woman in the closing years of a writing career, while Manzoor-Khan writes from the perspective of a higher educated British Muslim woman at the beginning of hers.

Troubled by such doubts, I started to consider why being a subject rather than an object was the furthest horizon I could dream of. What lay beyond ‘seeing with my own eyes’? What if ‘seeing for ourselves’ wasn’t actually the best way to see? What could transcend the desire to be see-er instead of seen? What if I closed my eyes and did not prioritise seeing at all?

Looking into these stranger possibilities, she contemplates the how to, and finds no easy route than to go forth and try. What results is a combination of prose, poetry and a short play interspersed throughout the text; looking at the question from different angles and so too, using different genres.

Need, Want, Seeing, Overcoming

The book is structured into seven parts:

the need - how I am found
the want - how I find myself
becoming a sight - the portal of objecthood
striving to see - seeking subjecthood is a circle
escaping the cycle - even stranger possibilities
grief is a type of ghaib - love is a type of sight
a note on endings - the impossibility of concluding

The need is about clarifying intention and the want is to bear witness to an existence. This latter section opens with a poignant vignette on hoarding nineteen white IKEA boxes in the author’s room that cause her shame. On further reflection, she discovers their ‘why’, they are evidence of a life.

I am afraid to let on about this in case it becomes obvious how afraid I am to go unseen. In case it becomes obvious how powerful it is to destroy a people’s history. How catastrophic it is to leave them believing they are suspended. To eliminate their past, present and knowledge.

The Writer and The Book in Conversation

Throughout the text are acts, scenes from a short play. It is how the book opens, Act 1, a conversation between the writer and the book.

the writer: You’re not what I expected you to be.

the book: What did you expect?

the writer: You were supposed to be about seeing and being seen
About the different gazes upon us
And how to see ourselves without them

the book looks smirkingly at the writer, knowing more than her (as always).

The way these brief interludes are positioned lightens the tone of the book, giving it a different vibe, featuring characters such as the writer, the book, her head, her heart, her fear, her eyes, her soul.

Because of their brevity, the voices of those characters speak more loudly and succinctly than the more existential meanderings of the author on changing her perspective of the gaze, from ‘others’ on her to (even stranger possibilities) just the ‘one’. The many different forms that address her subject, allow the reader to consider, reflect and attempt to understand the perspective being shared.

It is a philosophical read, of short easy-reading vignettes,some that challenge more than others, of poetry and the interspersed acts and scenes of the play featuring the writer, the book, her eyes, her fear, her head, her soul. In another scene, a group of onlookers struggle with the question of being seen, of invisibility, of too much visibility, of how we are perceived by others, by ourselves, by the Divine Presence…

It is a companionable read, though not easy to review, as the author reminds us, this is a book of questions, and it is also a journey, it is not a conclusion or a set of answers, it is observations, reflections, it invites participation, it does not exist in isolation.

It puts into word the frustrations and injustice of invisibility and challenges that which is seen (the blind scrutiny) in its place.

Perhaps rather than the head, the intellect, the eyes, the judgments, we ought to perceive with the soul, if so, what might that look like?

Rather than striving to be seen, approved or understood by gazes that shrink me, all I have to do is that which brings me closer to my Maker, who sees the full context of me. Everything else is either a means to this or a diversion from it.

The book is available from its UK publisher Hajar Press, and as an ebook here.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Author

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a poet and writer whose work disrupts assumptions about history, race, violence and knowledge.

She is the author of Tangled in Terror and the poetry collection Postcolonial Banter; a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University; and a contributor to the anthologies Cut from the Same Cloth? and I Refuse to Condemn.

Her writing has also featured in The Guardian and Al Jazeera, and her poetry has been viewed millions of times online. She is a co-founder of the Nejma Collective, a group of Muslims working in solidarity with people in prison. She is based in Leeds and is currently writing for theatre.

March 25, 2022 by Claire 'Word by Word'

The Passenger – Ireland

For Explorers of the World

essays Sara Baume Colum McCann Europa Editions Huginn and Muninn are two ravens from Norse mythology. Sent out by Odin at dawn each day, they return at night to perch on the god’s shoulders, whispering to him whatever knowledge and wisdom they have gathered from every corner of the world. Like Huginn and Muninn The Passenger travels far and wide to bring back the best writing from the countries it visits.

I’ve been reading this over the past week and only meant to read a couple more essays today, but they were so interesting, I kept going and finished it.

Featuring long form essays, investigative journalism, literary reportage and visual narratives, it takes readers beyond the familiar stereotypes to portray a country’s shifting culture and identity, its public debates, the sensibilities of its people, its burning issues, its pleasures and its pain. It was published in the UK by Europa Editions on March 17.

Some Numbers About Ireland

Essays About Ireland and the Irish Population (the island of Ireland) : 6.9 million (the highest since 1851)

Population (the Republic of Ireland) : 5.01 million

People Who Speak Irish at Home : 83,000

People Who Speak Polish at Home : 120,000

Castles or castle ruins : 30,000

Eurovision Song contest wins : 7 (more than any other country)

Nobel Prizes in Literature : 4

W.B. Yeats (1923),

George Bernard Shaw (1925)

Samuel Beckett (1969)

Seamus Heaney (1995)

11 Essays

The Mass is Ended by Catherine Dunne and Caelainn Hogan

A dual narrative essay written by two women writers from different generations, talking about growing up in Ireland as a woman, how it has begun to transform from an insular, conservative society under the repressive influence of the Catholic Church and how it continued to negatively impact women’s lives long after other countries began addressing such issues. The women discuss the decline of the Church’s influence, the dismantling of a system designed to oppress women and the culture of silence.

Bogland by William Atkins

A fascinating and insightful article about the natural phenomena of the midland area of Ireland, covered in peatlands, referred to locally as bogs. Initially seen as undesirable and an embarrassment, they then became a source of revenue, economic growth and jobs, not to mention local fuel. Environmentally controversial like many fuel extraction processes, the industry is now in decline and being phased out. The bogs have been found to contain human remains from the Iron Age dating back to between 470 BC.

An Ocean of Wisdom by Manchan Magnan

Photo by Kelly L on Pexels.com

Fascinated by the Irish language and its connection to fishing and the sea, we learn how the decline of a small local fishing industry heralded the decline and disappearance of much of the language. Magnan travelled to the three areas of Gaeltachtai (Irish speaking) to discover locals words and phrases that expressed aspects of the sea, weather and coastal life, linguistic nuances that described a way of life that is disappearing (due to the impact of foreign fishing trawlers) and with it, a form of expression and being.

Like other old tongues, the Irish language has unique ways of expressing things – one example of which is that Irish regards the unseen world as being just as real as the seen, and this is evident in many ofthe phrases, metaphors and colloquial expressions that make up daily speech. So the word ceantar, for instance, means place, region or locality, while alltar is its opposite, the other realm, the netherworld. They exist simultaneously in all places at all times.

Our physical bodies occupy the ceantar, but our minds can easily slip into the alltar. Only a thin veil separates the two realms, and there were always those who could pass from one to the other, as is demonstrated by the word púicín, which refers to a supernatural covering that allows otherworldly beings to appear unseen in this reality.

The efforts to revive and reconnect to the language and the growing awareness of the importance language is to maintaining connection to a culture is encouraging. Losing language is to lose meaning and connection, reclaiming it might well contribute to the country’s healing process.

Talismans by Sara Baume

Sara Baume is know for her two fiction novels, a third Seven Steeples due out in Apr ’22, however if you’ve read her excellent work of nonfiction Handiwork, you’ll know she is a visual artist and loves crafting things, using her hands, sculpting or making things from different materials and they always have a theme.

creative nonfiction bird migration songbirds In Handiwork, she was sculpting birds, but here she writes about the Irish cottage, its evolution and the rise of the Irish villas that were much despised for a period of time. As she spends months creating objects that represent small scale versions of these houses, she reflects on the way Ireland’s built environment has changed.

The idea was to draw a contrast between the grandiosity of the monster mansions and my choice of coarse, everyday materials – the intention being to invent an updated and deeply cynical souvenir.

She visits a reconstructed Irish cottage with Marion McGarry, author of The Irish Cottage: History, Culture and Design (2017), who recounts :

‘the fire was both physically and socially situated in the centre of the house’. Whereas European families routinely gathered around the kitchen table, the Irish would push all of their furniture back against the walls to surround the light and heat of the hearth.

Everything that Falls Must Also Rise – by Colum McCann

The New York based Irish writer reflects on the choice he and many others made to emigrate, what it’s like to return, to become an outsider and be rooted elsewhere, yet still refer to it as home. Full of nostalgia, this one almost feels out of place in the collection, and the enlarged font size stands out almost as a clue to the demographic its likely to appeal to.

At The Edge of Two Unions: Northern Ireland’s Causeway Coast by Mark Devenport

The BBC’s former political editor in Northern Ireland writes about a region hanging in the balance between two Unions, the UK and the EU, torn between fear and opportunity and the distinct feeling of having been abandoned. A century of Northern Ireland, how attitudes and loyalties are evolving and changing with the generations and neighbouring affiliations.

Suicides of the Ceasefire Babies (originally published in 2016) by Lyra McKee

Photo by Luke Webb on Pexels.com

An essay written by the journalist Lyra McKee, who investigated the troubling fact that since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, more people in Northern Ireland have committed suicide than were killed during the 30 year conflict.

This was a fascinating read, because it ties in with Kerri Ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places and when I began to read Lyra’s essay and her questions, I could tell what was coming, because if you’ve read Thin Places and imagined how many other young people have been exposed to what she had been (including being told “you lot had it much easier than our generation” by their parents) and the subsequent suppression of their feelings/emotions, it’s not surprising that there is a significant proportion of the population, particularly in the towns of Belfast and Derry that have suffered the delayed effects of PTSD, without even knowing it.

Her investigation looks at the cause, uncovers existing research and also learns about how trauma survivors pass their behaviours and certain genes (when parental trauma has been experienced prior to conception) to children.

Intergenerational transmission of trauma is not just a sociological or psychological problem, but also a biological one.

Sadly, Lyra McKee was murdered in 2019.

What I Learned On My Trip to Westeros by Mark O’Connell

I guess there had to be the one that references The Game of Thrones, little more than a guided tour of the locations, an attempt to make a connection between the fantasy of the land imagined by George R.R. Martin (inspired by 15th century civil wars) and the more recent history and reality of a divided land.

Unfortunately, the lens through which he views things around him obscures the actual landscape and barely disguises his disdain for the local guides, while going off on a tangent about a novel relating to the philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations of the Argentinian author Borges.

Citizens’ Assemblies: Experiments in Democracy by Ursula Barry

An excellent and insightful look into the establishment of Citizens’ Assemblies, an invention and intervention by common people to facilitate decision making on important issues that have gone unresolved by politicians for far too long.

This was brilliant, I wasn’t aware that it was these assemblies that had been behind some of the most significant changes and reforms in Ireland’s constitution, and a model that has and is being used elsewhere in Europe, when the population begins to protest and govt wants to listen but is unable to act, here is another way that is even more democratic perhaps, than elected officials, who get tied up with multiple agendas and lose sight of the common citizen, especially those adversely affected by outdated policies and inhumane practices.

The final two essays were about one man’s interest in Irish music (from a perspective of a lifetime living in England) and rugby, neither of which particularly interested me enough to write about here!

Overall, an excellent exploration of the life and times of modern Ireland. Beautifully illustrated and highly recommended.

March 4, 2022 by Claire 'Word by Word'

My Top 5 Irish Fiction & Nonfiction Books

It’s Reading Ireland Month and in addition to posting reviews as and when I read books from my Irish Literature pile, I’ll be following Cathy at 746book’s weekly prompts to explore some past favourites.

This week it’s a Top 5 prompt and I was going to do novels, but many of my all time favourite Irish reads are nonfiction, so I’m sharing both.

week 1 Top 5

Top 5 Irish Fiction

There are more than 5 Irish novels that I have rated 5 star reads, so I’m listing the first five that come to mind, that have stayed with me, below. Click on the title to read my review. So honorable mentions to : the incredible Booker Prize winning Milkman by Anna Burns and Donal Ryan’s All We Shall Know, my favourite of the four novels of his I’ve read.

Best Non Fiction Read of 2020 1. A Ghost In the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa – this was my One Outstanding Read of 2020. Poet and essayist Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s work of autofiction/essay reflects on history, motherhood, female passions and the elusiveness of time, place and identity. All this, while reading, rereading, thinking about and translating a 200 year old Irish poem she is obsessed with: “Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire” by the 18th century noblewoman Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Somehow she combines this into a fluid, mesmerising text that grabs the reader. Insists. Provokes. Opens Up. Reclaims space. Awakens. Utterly compelling.

“In performing this oblique reading, I’ll devote myself to luring female lives back from male texts. Such an experiment in reversal will reveal, I hope, the concealed lives of women, present, always, but coded in invisible ink.”

Sara Baume Ireland Dogs in Literature Literary Fiction 2. Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume – I read Baume’s work of nonfiction Handiwork before any of her novels; I remember looking forward to reading this, wondering what her fiction was going to be like. Having now read three of her books it is clear she has become my current favourite Irish author. Using her unique, rhythmic, contemplative style and way of creating character that is so measured and thoughtful, this novel is about a man getting himself into a state after taking on a stray dog and as it complicates his life, escaping with him on a road trip. It is exquisite, playful and surprising.

“I expected it would be exciting; I expected that the freedom from routine was somehow greater than the freedom to determine your own routine. I wanted to get up in the morning and not know exactly what I was going to do that day. But now that I don’t, it’s terrifying.”

Irish literary fiction Visual Artist 3. A Line Made By Walking by Sara Baume – No surprise then that her second novel is also in my Top 5, a stunning work about a young woman leaving Dublin city to return to her roots. She moves into her grandmother’s empty, neglected ‘for sale’ house, a place of temporary refuge as she deals with an aberration in her mental health.

Visual art is part of her recovery and the novel includes references to over seventy art installations that she tests herself on. Taking quiet charge of her own healing, creating daily purpose, the novel is itself the work of an artist. Brilliant.

“Why must I test myself? Because no one else will, not any more. Now that I am no longer a student of any kind, I must take responsibility for the furniture inside my head. I must slide new drawers into chests and attach new rollers to armchairs. I must maintain the old highboys and sideboards and whatnots. Polish, patch, dust, buff. And, from scratch, I must build new frames and appendages; I must fill the drawers and roll along.”

Michelle Gallen Big Girl Small Town CWIP Prize 2020 4. Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen – this was a novel I saw being talked about on twitter and bought on a whim, in part because the setting in a fish & chip shop in Northern Ireland reminded me so much of our own funny story (linguistic challenge) in a chip shop in the seaside town of Newcastle in 2019.

Written in a phonetic vernacular that creates a harmonious rhythm, it follows a week in the life of socially awkward but inwardly clear-eyed, 27-year-old Majella who has a list of stuff in her head she doesn’t like and has just learned her 85 year old grandmother may have been murdered. It’s entertaining, kind of sad, funny and confrontational. Not my usuaI literary fare, but I totally loved it.

“Sometimes Majella thought that she should condense her whole list of things she wasn’t keen on into a single item: – Other People.”

Hearts Furies 5. The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne – this novel was on so many reader’s best books list the year it came out, along with an intriguing premise, I was curious.

A heart and soul epic, with a little inspiration from his own life, it is about a boy coming to terms with his identity, exposing aspects of Ireland’s history, juxtaposed with that of the Netherland’s and the US, as Cyril’s life takes him to both those places.

The novel focuses on Cyril’s attempts to survive in a world hostile to his natural inclinations, his experiences highlighting struggles many encountered during those years, unable to live their lives openly and honestly without the fear of rejection or violence.

It is a courageous attempt to show how the way we conform to society and culture’s expectations against our own nature, can be harmful to so many, making us wonder how life might be, if we lived in a more utopian world, where tolerance reigned supreme. Thought provoking and profound.

“A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face.”

Top 5 Irish Nonfiction

creative nonfiction bird migration songbirds 1. Handiwork by Sara Baume – the book that sparked my interest in the work of visual artist, sculptor and writer Sara Baume, it’s like a notebook, not too many words on each page or chapter, sharing something of her year of sculpting birds. A place for reflections on her experience, observations and insights, connections, including memories of her father and grandfather who also worked with their hands.

Quotes from influential texts she’s known for years offer up additional wisdom as daily she repeats the same rhythm; crafting, sculpting, writing, reading. Like a songbird, this mini book tweets its tribute to those who craft and create, following an intuitive inclination to fashion one thing out of another using their hands.

“From my Dad I inherited a propensity for handiwork, but also the terrible responsibility, the killing insistence.”

nature writing Wainwright prize 2. Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty – Incredibly this book was written by a 15 year old boy with an ability beyond his years, it is a diary of observations of the natural world around him, a place that provides him with a breathing space, a remedy to the way he is in the world.

The book follows the seasons through the senses of this autistic boy, who has a passion for nature and the environment and a family in tune with he and his siblings needs. Deservedly won The Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing.

“Many people accuse me of ‘not looking autistic’. I have no idea what that means. I know lots of ‘autistics’ and we all look different. We’re not some recognisable breed. We are human beings. If we’re not out of the ordinary, it’s because we’re fighting to mask our real selves. We’re holding back and holding in. It’s a lot of effort.”

Maggie O'Farrell Memoir Near Death Experiences 3. I Am, I Am, I Am – Seventeen Brushes With Death by Maggie O’Farrell – known for her award winning novel Hamnet, this is O’Farrell’s memoir told through multiple intriguing encounters with death. The opening story is heart-stopping and frightening, deliberately placed to capture attention.

An interesting insight is the awareness of her fearlessness, something that a brush with death seems to bolster, that fortunately motherhood will quell.

“It was not so much that I didn’t value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer. Nearly losing my life at the age of eight made me sanguine – perhaps to a fault – about death. I knew it would happen, at some point, and the idea didn’t scare me; its proximity felt instead almost familiar. The knowledge that I was lucky to be alive, that it so easily could have been otherwise, skewed my thinking.”

constellations-sinead-gleeson 4. Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson – In her Reflections on Life, Gleeson writes essays, using parts of the body to structure the narrative, a body containing metal like constellations of stars that front each chapter.

Her essays share the struggles, shame, hopes and disappointments, of bones, of blood, of hair, of children, of grief. They bear witness to a deteriorating mind, experiences that seem like weakness, that have contributed to moulding a psyche of great strength and perseverance. An activist. A voice. A woman standing in the light, seen, heard, inspiring others.

“Kahlo, Grealy and Spence were lights in the dark for me, a form of guidance. A triangular constellation. To me, they showed that it was possible to live a parallel creative life, one that overshadows the patient life, nudging it off centre stage…That in taking all the pieces of the self, fractured by surgery, there is a rearrangement: making wounds the source of inspiration, not the end of it.”

affair with mother 5. An Affair With My Mother by Caitriona Palmer – an incredible adoption memoir written by an Irish journalist now living in the US, who has an experience in her mid twenties common to many adoptees, often referred to as “coming out of the fog”, when they realise that despite a happy childhood and apparent lack of effect of the trauma of relinquishment – something isn’t quite right. It’s a crisis that often results in them seeking to understand their identity, to know who they are, not who they were raised to be.

Palmer finds and meets her birth mother in Ireland, initially it is a positive experience, but the continued shame and fear of the mother, and her insistence on their connection remaining secret, compromises the connection.

In addition to sharing her story Palmer digs deep into the history of adoption in Ireland, researching archives and interviewing those affected. It’s an affecting, intimate account of real lives that continue to be impacted today, a cruel legacy of church and state judging and shaming young women, punishing innocent children.

“What I didn’t understand was that that primary loss impacted me, it did change me, I’m still grieving her. Despite my wonderful happy life, amazing husband and children… I’m internally grieving, this woman, this ghost, that’s a love that I’ll never regain in a way, memoir is an attempt to grasp at that.

I wanted people to know you can grow up happily adopted and still have this hole, I always feel like there is a hole deep down inside of me that I can’t quite fill, in spite of the abundance of love that surrounds me, this primary loss is profound.”

An Italian Voice of Note Rediscovered

Notes and Quotes From A Few Essays

Winter in the Abruzzi (1944) and Worn Out Shoes (1945)

On England, Eulogy & Lament (1960, 1961)

Human Relationships

On Writing

The Little Virtues (1960)

Further Reading

Reading Women In Translation

Lessons From My Year of Untamed Thinking

Writings of the Past

History Repeats

Author, Elizabeth Boyle

A Poet Writing Nature Essays

Making Ripples at 60

The Bass Rock and Bird Flu

Further Reading

Author, Kathleen Jamie

Further Reading

Carmel Mc Mahon, Author

Through a Window of Words, I See

Introspection, Projection, Finding Direction

The Feline Interruptor

Author, Amina Cain

Top 5 Non-Fiction, An Irish Scoop

Special Mentions, The Other Two Stand Outs

Bonding With the Irish Over Tea & Poetry

A Working Class Teen Dares to Do Better

The Daffodil Drama

Tributes to the Mothers & Imagination

A Musical Accompaniment

Author, Poet, Essayist, Lorna Goodison

Essays, Prose and a Play on Seeing

Need, Want, Seeing, Overcoming

The Writer and The Book in Conversation

Further Reading

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Author

For Explorers of the World

Some Numbers About Ireland

11 Essays

The Mass is Ended by Catherine Dunne and Caelainn Hogan

Bogland by William Atkins

An Ocean of Wisdom by Manchan Magnan

Talismans by Sara Baume

Everything that Falls Must Also Rise – by Colum McCann

At The Edge of Two Unions: Northern Ireland’s Causeway Coast by Mark Devenport

Suicides of the Ceasefire Babies (originally published in 2016) by Lyra McKee

What I Learned On My Trip to Westeros by Mark O’Connell

Citizens’ Assemblies: Experiments in Democracy by Ursula Barry

Top 5 Irish Fiction

Top 5 Irish Nonfiction

Next Week: My Year In Irish Lit!