The O Bruadair Inheritance: Some Left a Name Behind Them

"Up Tipp!" my great-aunt Nellie would shout, even late in her life when I first visited her in Clara, County Offaly, and her memory-filled mind had begun to drift. Official records at the Custom House in Dublin say that she was born in Portumna, in the eastern part of County Galway, but one of her favorite stories was of the time her father took her to a hurling match and became so excited that he threw—or as she put it, "pegged"—his hat into the air. Her father was a Tipperary man for sure, and her brother—my father's father—claimed as his birthplace the crossroads village of Toomevara, not far the heart of the heart of that hurling-mad county. Eventually, the family settled in Clara, where my great-grandfather, a harness-maker by trade, found steady work at the Goodbody factory; my paternal grandfather and grandmother both emigrated from Clara to New York City. My father, who was born in Manhattan, in turn emigrated north of the border to Prince Edward Island more than a half-century ago. I was born and grew up on the Island but have settled, apparently permanently, in Massachusetts; four of my six siblings, too, have dispersed as if at the four winds' will. God only knows where our children, and our children's children, will end up as this familial diaspora continues.

In Ulysses, James Joyce constructs an elaborate conceit comparing the Irish experience and that of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and at times I have found that analogy disquietingly apt for my own family's nomadic movement over several generations. In fact, struck by a story my father told me about the central role the family phonograph played in his immigrant Irish home on Manhattan's east side, I composed my own conceit about how recordings by the Sligo fiddler Michael Coleman or the Irish tenor John McCormack might represent the Ark of the Covenant for a newly displaced people:

Though common as a steamer trunk upended deep
in steerage, taking space, that Edison Victrola
seemed a cubit-measured casket for plates
of black shellac encased in upright
shelves below the crank-wound works.
Tempered tablets etched in finespun
whorls like fingerprinted code, those
waxen disks composed a tabernacled
covenant for homesick exiles
fixed in heartsore hope before
the upraised lid.¹

I like to think that, in many respects, that poem fits the description Seamus Heaney has applied to "Digging," the famous opening poem of his first volume, Death of a Naturalist: "a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem."² I did indeed build this poem, titled "East Side Story," to carry a lot of weight—the combined weight of personal, familial and tribal history. But I hope that, like Heaney's in its far more subtle way, my poem—concluding wistfully with "Holding at forearm's length an old recording / I can almost feel my father's father / link his arm with mine"—also works a variation on the theme (really, more apologia than apology) that W. B. Yeats addresses in the prefatory poem to his volume Responsibilities (1914): "I have nothing but a book, / Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine."³

So doing, "East Side Story" not only expressed my desire but, in its own way, fulfilled that desire to link myself both to my father's boyhood world of New York City in the 1930s and to a larger sense of my Irish and Irish-American heritage on the paternal side of my family. Perhaps an overly ambitious lyric, it was—I now suppose—my own attempt at "going down and down / For the good turf," as Heaney puts it.⁴ Describing my father's telling of the story of how his father's fellow Irish immigrants, some of them friends and relatives from Clara...