Madam, - I am not alone among the exiles in citing Kevin Myers's always bracing and frequently hilarious columns as a compelling reason - among several other good ones - to pay for the privilege of downloading Ireland.com first thing six mornings a week. Long may his elegant Philippics continue to goad and tickle our complacencies!
To my dismay, however, be absurdly classified Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire in his column of July 24th as typifying an Irish cult which glories in the "enchantments of victimhood and oppression: infinitely preferable to complex reality". The Caoineadh is simply the most powerful of all live elegies: furious in its grief, intensely erotic, wave after bursting wave of extreme and stricken love, and nowhere the slightest suggestion of self-pitying victimhood.
It comes in a metrical tradition unique, as far as I know, to women's laments of West Cork and many strophes of the extended version (brilliantly edited by Sean Ó Tuama of UCC) are undoubtedly not of Eibhlín Dubh's own composition; but this doesn't matter because the whole piece as it has survived is uninterruptedly glorious. Nowhere in poetry or song ancient or modern (at least in the languages I can access) have I encountered the power of raw female emotion rendered so symphonically. I often recite the whole poem aloud, from the delicious love-songs of the opening to the thudding coffin-lids at the end. Unfailingly, I am deeply moved.
So too would be the author of the much underrated Banks of Green Willows were he to overcome what appears to be an unreasoning dislike of the Irish language. He has missed out on some of the greatest poetry in the world. - Yours, etc.,
MICHAEL LILLIS, Ocean Drive, Key Biscayne, Florida, USA.