William Carleton said, he wrote of:
“a class unknown in literature, unknown by their landlords, and unknown by those in whose hands much of their destiny was placed. If I became the historian of their habits and manners … it was because I saw no person willing to undertake a task which must be looked upon as an important one.”
~
Watercress Soufflé recipe from Regina Sexton’s Little History of Irish Food
~
Tamasin Day-Lewis, West of Ireland Summers
Pp 7-8.5
11.5
33-35
~
Caitríona O’Reilly’s Thin
http://mattduckworthunderwater.blogspot.ie/2011/12/catriona-oreillys-thin.html
~
Lent
by Victoria Kennefick
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/hennessy-niw/lent-1.2155910
Sister, let’s unwrap Lent like a treat,
stroke the smooth chocolate egg beneath,
the one that we couldn’t eat;
the wafer, yes, but no ice-cream.
Little Jesuses in the desert for forty days
and nights, with no dessert.
The devil tapping on our flat-black
window pane before bed;
mother, cutting tiny slices of bread
in the kitchen corner, eating from doll plates.
She couldn’t be prouder of our ecstasy
of denial, little letter-box lips refusing
all the sins of the tongue.
Easter bells rattled the glass,
Christ has risen, Alleluia.
The Resurrection with chocolate sauce
made us sick and giddy, pupils
rising in our irises, yours
the most divine Holy-Mary blue.
We held hands, spun around,
fizzy-headed, falling down.
Open the chocolate box, sister,
see liquor-centred grown-up sweets.
Pillows of sin, full
with seven deadly tastes,
a menu read to us on waking.
In the Ordinary Time of your dark kitchen,
we drop tissuey tea bags into boiled water.
Rust whispers to transparency.
Peace blooms,
bleeding into molecules,
slowly.
~
Nuala Ní Chonchúir: ‘I think about my 30th birthday. That was the day I had my first miscarriage – I bled out my honeymoon baby. I had my seventh pregnancy and fourth miscarriage last year at 45’
~
