The Depth of Irish Bogs

 

As I have been looking for a newer Irish woman author for my classes on Irish literature, I’ve been trying out a few different names that have been given to me.  Sally Rooney was suggested, and so I picked up a copy of Normal People.  Ronney is a talented writer with a creative narrative style, and in this book her two young-adult characters, Connell and Marianne, lead troubled and complicated lives. They are compelling, and richly painted characters.  At first, I felt uncomfortable with Connell (and his treatment of Marianne) and then I became uncomfortable with Marianne.  They are two characters that develop, but maybe not in the most positive ways. It is a novel that explores mental health issues, sexual desire, and changing relationships.  Overall, it was a book that made me uncomfortable, which is not always a bad thing for a novel to do, but in this case the plot left me convinced that it wasn’t something that would transition easily into the classroom for me. So that was crossed off the list. 

Then I found a copy of Bog Child at the local charity shop.  It is a work that I had heard about, and because of the “Bog Poems” by Seamus Heaney that I had already assigned in previous classes, I thought it would tie in well.  Set in the 1980s, Bog Child, by Siobhan Dowd was a quite enjoyable read.  It is set against a backdrop of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, the somewhat random boundary line between the two countries, the issue of ownership (of the past and of the present), the hunger strikers, the Provisional IRA, religious differences, and of course, the recovery of and the mystery around a bog body. It is a quick read that I would categorize as Young-Adult fiction, but I do think I would use it for a class if I travel with students to Ireland again. It has so many possibilities for tying into Irish culture, history, and the literature we read. It is a work that does a good job of presenting the depth of the Irish experience.  As Heaney writes in “Bogland” “Every layer they strip / seems camped on before. / The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. / The wet center is bottomless” (25-28).

Good Day Sunshine : Dungarvan Edition

 

It’s another beautiful day in Dungarvan. 52 degrees and sunny.  That’s the normal temperature pretty much year-round, I think.  It is a bit warmer in the summer and a bit colder some days in the winter, but they don’t get temperature extremes like we do in the States during the different seasons.  They call the south of Ireland the “Sunny Coast.”  That name seems to have merit. Ireland is known for being rainy, but we have been lucky with weather, and lucky to be in the sunny part of Ireland. Today we wrapped up the poetry of William Butler Yeats, a Nobel Prize winning Irish poet.  Today’s poems were written later in Yeats’ life, and thus they are a bit more difficult and a bit longer winded. That is something I can relate to. The students did well with them. Yeats describes the changing cycles of the seasons, the circles of life, the spirals “turning and turning in the widening gyre” (1) as described in “the Second Coming,” and the “bell-beat” (17) of the swans’ wings as they “scatter wheeling in great broken rings” (11) as described in "The Wild Swans at Coole." Seasons change, but in the cycle of life some things remain constant, like the repetition of the cycle itself.  We finished today’s class with “Among School Children” which I think is a reflection on the cycle, or arc, of life.  It is about youth and age, the corporal and the spiritual, restrictive learning and expansive imagination, art and nature, spiritual love and earthly love, and how these things are not easily separated into oppositions or component parts. The stages of life cannot be separated from life itself, Yeats may be saying. All these things are needed to form something complete, like “the yolk and the white of the one shell” (16). All the seasons are needed, and all the stages of life are needed in order to have a whole. And so, the winter turns to spring, and the spring turns to summer, and the seasons change, if only somewhat when one is in Ireland.