Selected Poems / Rogha Dánta

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Máirtín Ó’Direáin was born and raised on the Aran Islands—a world made famous by the writers of the literary revival, chiefly J. M. Synge—but worked in the civil service, first in Galway and then in Dublin for the rest of his adult life. This became the basis of a tension in his work between the rural and the urban. Editor Frank Sewell writes that Ó Direáin’s “most important theme” was “the conflict and contradictions (for individuals and nations) that derive from the exchange between tradition and modernity…He frequently favored rural values over modern city modes of living,” while “in politics, he was (unsurprisingly) an anti-imperialist internationalist. But what this means is that, in practice, he was open to receiving art and ideas both from his own culture (past and present) and also from a wide range of languages and cultures.” Simple in style, but deep in reflection, these poems beautifully convey the dilemmas of a poet of a minority language and traditional culture in a rapidly developing era. Edited and translated by Frank Sewell, with an introduction.