Irish Poems: from Cromwell to the Famine

A Miscellany

Joan Keefe

1977
ISBN 0838718879

When Irish as a literary and vernacular language died out almost completely after the famine of the 1840s, the existence of a large body of poetry was forgotten, buried in obscure and indecipherable manuscripts. It is certain that a considerable portion was lost, although some poems that had passed into oral tradition, often anonymously, were preserved in folksong. Folklore was also the medium through which fragmentary legends, concerning the poems themselves, lingered. Half a century later a new generation of scholars rediscovered the neglected literature and their labors of transcribing and translating lead to an accessible material that became one of the mainsprings of the two major cultural movements of modern Ireland, the Irish Literary Revival and the Irish Language Revival.

Joan Keefe here presents her new versions of poems that come from the time when the great tradition of Irish poetry, as it had been known for a thousand years, was being brought to an end.

About the author:

Joan Keefe was born in Ireland, and was educated at University College Dublin and at the University of California, Berkeley. She has taught Irish literature in the Arts and Humanities program at Berkeley, and has given many poetry readings in the San Francisco Bay area. She is co-editor of The Penguin Book of Poetry by Women and The Other Voice, An Anthology of Poetry by Women.