Mayo Littoral: Michael Longley's Eco-elegies

It was to the West or, to be more precise, to certain privileged parts of the West that the re-discoverers of Ireland's ancient soul looked through a haze of mystic wonder. The western seaboard and its islands were transformed in plays, poems, and translations of songs and folk tales from a series of "powerful compensatory counter-images" into a fully fledged national form that Eamon de Valéra would later re-imagine as a "frugal" republic.¹ For the Revivalists, the Irish nation would be an expanded version of this West—which was, in fact, a simulacrum, a hyper-reality, having little or nothing to do with the conditions affecting the lives of most of the inhabitants whose lives were blighted by extreme poverty and hardship, by tension between tenant and landlord's agent, by the hemorrhage of emigration, and by the lingering effects of the Famine. At the very same time as it was being appropriated by the revivalists as the national ideal in microcosm, the West remained on the precarious edge of subsistence."² As Catherine Nash notes, "another West thus shadowed the celebration of the area by cultural nationalists."³

It comes as something of a shock, therefore, to realize that the West of Ireland continues to serve as the ultimate adventure park for writers, painters, and photographers in search of authentic Irish experience. The landscapes, place-names, flora and fauna, traditional culture, and—to a strikingly limited degree—the people of the West, provide a realm in which signs are taken as marvels and where the artist figure can dwell, albeit temporarily, in a satisfyingly holistic relationship to an environment supposedly distinct from all other locations on the island. Fully aware that the West was conjured into existence largely by the sheer ferocity of Revivalist desire, Seamus Heaney nevertheless avows the transformative properties of the place that offer hope even for the most stony-hearted of sceptics:

even a disenchanted critic, tired of exposing the mystifications of social and economic reality in that old Celtic Twilight of cottage and curragh, cannot fail to respond to vistas of stone-walled plains running to the horizon and shifting cloudscapes underlit from the Atlantic. For in spite of the west of Ireland's status as a country of myth, the actual place can still awaken an appetite for experience that is pristine and unconstrained.⁴

Far from being peripheral, the West occupies a central place in Irish writing in general, and in poetry in particular. In continuing more-or-less unscathed into contemporary writing, the West, and journeys "into" it, constitutes perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Revivalists. In imagining a nation, the Revivalists almost always set up a rigid opposition between what Joep Leerssen terms "a materialist, vulgar, modern, down-to-earth East [and] a dreamy, mystical, time-less West." ⁵ For Leerssen, representations of the Celtic West,

describe, not a place, but a direction, a penetration or an approach, a movement from the east to the west . . . not so much an arrival but rather a constant deferral, a quest for the Other place, each stage of the journey being only a mid-way point towards the yet more distant mirage on, or just beyond, the horizon. . . . The Real Celtia is always an unspecified or unspecifiable Beyond.⁶

But which West are we talking about? Into which West are the artists and the writers drawn? Certainly not to the cities: Limerick, Cork, or Sligo. Nor to the towns: Ennis, Letterkenny, or Bundoran. The region into which they travel is the hard West, the Wild West.⁷ It is a largely unpeopled landscape of "Water and ground in their extremity."⁸ In opposition to the urban East and North, the poets' West is populated in the main by animals; it is a place in which the silence is broken only by the wind, by the crashing of Atlantic breakers, and by birds' calls. It is a place that seems to stand outside time. Most strikingly, it is a place unscarred by the divisions that marked other locations, most notably those that...