tara christie
bloody parade of history’ and to observe ‘with regret and distress what has been
leftbehind and lost’. Writing often of his birthplace in the rural Gaeltacht at the
foot of Mount Errigal in County Donegal, an area of the world celebrated more
in the (disappearing) oral tradition of the Gaeltacht than in the written tradition,
O Searcaigh elaborates upon his role as poet-archivist: ́
I have become the collector of its oral traditions, the archivist of its memories and myths,
the narrator of its stony maps. In this role, I am like the Gaelic poets of the past, recording
and registering what is past or passing. Poetry for me is a means of making memorable what
is being forgotten.... The challenge for all of us who belong to minority cultures is to find
ways of creating a collaboration between our past and our present.^73
Perhaps drawn to more obscure and overlooked poets of the past for some of the
same reasons that he is drawn to forgotten customs and ways of life in the Gaeltacht
and abroad,O Searcaigh identifies with Rosenberg not only as a poet who resists the ́
ready-made categories available to him, but also as a marginalized poet belonging
to a ‘minority culture’. Light-heartedly referring to himself in a recent interview as
‘the unknown Irish poet’,O Searcaigh speaks of a certain devotion to Rosenberg ́
becausehe is under-appreciated, unknown, misunderstood, and marginalized:
Speaking Gaelic...being gay...makes me a marginalized figure as a poet....The act
of repossession is vitally important to me. Thomas Kinsella’sPoems of the Dispossessed
[An Duanaire: 1600–1900, Poems of the Dispossessed(1981)] was an important book of
poetry...from the dark ages of the Irish psyche. I believe that my own book of Irish poetry
should be calledPoems of Repossession, and would begin in the 1940s onward. We [Gaelic
poets] have repossessed our tradition in the Irish language, in the way that Isaac Rosenberg
repossessed his own heritage in his poetry.^74
O Searcaigh has spoken elsewhere of his ́ duchas ́ —an Irish word which he loosely
translatesas‘theculturalendowmentthatwereceivefromourpeople’spast’^75 —and
given the long-standing tradition of Irish writing engaged with Jewish literature
and history, it is interesting to think of the Anglo-Jewish Rosenberg as part ofO ́
Searcaigh’sduchas ́. Recent examples of this tradition includeThe Gossamer Wall:
Poems in Witness to the Holocaust(2002) by the Gaelic poet MichaelOSiadhail, ́^76
and Paul Muldoon’s recent poem ‘The Grand Conversation’, in which an Irish ‘He’
and a Jewish ‘She’ play a ‘game of ancestral persecution one-upmanship’.^77
O Searcaigh’s poem, ‘Do Isaac Rosenberg’/‘For Isaac Rosenberg’ (trans. Frank ́
Sewell) was first published inHuman Rights Have No Borders(1998), a poetry
(^73) O Searcaigh, ‘Cultures of Ulster/Rhythms of Ulster’, n.d.; ́ http://www.culturesofulster.com/
CathalOSearcaighaddress.htm
(^74) O Searcaigh, telephone interview with Tara Christie, 29 June 2005. ́
(^75) O Searcaigh, ‘Cultures of Ulster/Rhythms of Ulster’. ́
(^76) MichaelOSiadhail, ́ The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust(Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
Bloodaxe, 2002).
(^77) Jenny Ludwig, ‘As If WashingMight Make it Clean’,Boston Review(Summer2003);http://www.
bostonreview.net/BR28.3/ludwig.html