By Paddy Bushe

My Lord Buddha of Carraig Éanna

Paddy Bushe’s 2011 collection of poetry, inspired by both travels abroad and his home place.

Description

Commencing in Norwich Cathedral where “organ-pipes, sunstruck by the last rays / Through the high cathedral windows, beamed / Beyond sin or sanctity”, the poems in Paddy Bushe’s new collection explore questions of identity and self- knowledge, particularly in the light of time spent in places such as the abandoned monastic settlement of Skellig Michael, or the mountains of Nepal. The coming together of here and there, of East and West, is alluded to in the title poem, centred around a plastercast of the Buddha in the poet’s garden “Rooted in all this betwixt and between!”

The fourth section is made up of poems that deal with mortality, fragility, the threat of loss and “utter absence”, as well as poems of joy and transcendence. The book closes with The Howl for Art Ó Laoghaire, the poet’s translation of the great eighteenth-century Gaelic poem, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire

“Despite the tough tone of Bushe’s poetry, reflecting its material, there is an intelligent sensitivity always at work that does justice to the more tender of human experiences” – The Irish Times


ISBN 9781906614522 paperback
97 pp, 216 x 140 mm / 5.5″ x 8.5″
February 2012

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About The Author

Author

Paddy Bushe was born in Dublin in 1948 and now lives in Waterville, Co. Kerry. He writes in Irish and in English. His collections include Poems With Amergin (1989), Digging Towards The Light (1994), In Ainneoin na gCloch (2001), Hopkins on Skellig Michael (2001) and The Nitpicking of Cranes (2004). To Ring in Silence: New and Selected Poems was published in 2008. He edited the anthology Voices at the World’s Edge: Irish Poets on Skellig Michael (Dedalus, 2010). His latest collections are My Lord Buddha of Carraig Eanna (2012), On A Turning Wing (2016) and Móinéar an Chroí (2017). He received the 2006 Oireachtas prize for poetry, the 2006 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award and the 2017 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. He is a member of Aosdána. In 2020, Dedalus Press publishes Double Vision, a two-volume publication comprising Second Sight, the author's own selection of his Irish language poems, accompanied by the author's own translations, as well as Peripheral Vision, his latest collection in English. The Rolling Wave on RTÉ Radio 1 in Nov 2022 devoted an entire show to Paddy Bushe's poems and the tunes and songs they respond to: the show is available here.