The 5,000-year-old passage tomb of Newgrange is an apt illustration of how important stone is. The engraving on the stones in front of the entrance are even older. No one knows exactly how much older, for their meaning has long been forgotten. Everything, says Bee Smith’s poem, is about rock. The rocks are far older than we are. We can only guess at their stories. And so we have to invent our own, while keeping true to the little that they do reveal.
Sandra Hayes and Maurice Devitt consider the possibilities in anonymous rocks. Robert Elliott discovers the natural curiosity of the hag stone and humanises the most remote rock in these islands. Bee Smith considers a very particular rock from the Cavan Burren, while I meditate on discovering a previously unknown gravestone and on the the relationship between writing, oral stories and fossils. The tale with the deepest roots is Eurynimi: inspired by a Greek Orphic hymn of 200 AD, and a tradition far older, it tells a myth of creation that uses many of the same elements as the Genesis stories, but with a very different result.
Even stones do not last forever, and Sarah Davenport’s poem Dust is perhaps more in tune with our own uncertain times.
Yet rocks and places, though changing, remain long enough to be loved for a lifetime. John McCann celebrates his home townland of Cavanacarragh, and in The Man who Brought the Swallows, Tony Brady tells of a life lived only a few miles away. And, from the same area, the only known published poem of Pat Cassidy of Glengesh reminds us that when all else fails there is always the consolation of reading.
Jenny Brien
Image Credit: wynnert
