Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two Nov-Dec 2026
Poetry In Times Of Chaos, guest editorial by Thomas McCarthy.
The world seems to be absolutely chaotic. The cruelties and genocides of recent days, in particular the wanton deaths of children, propel us into a darker understanding of human nature; but also that more depressing realization that our material sophistication has not altered our human, or inhuman, capacity for mass murder. Though, looking at history, the world is probably no more chaotic than it was in 1,000 CE or 1,000 BCE. In 1014 CE it would have been extremely dangerous to wander along the banks of the Dodder or the Liffey in the port of Dublin. After all, thousands of native Irish and invading Danish and Norse warriors were fighting in a last-ditch battle for survival: their prize was the High-Kingship of Ireland. In the Eastern Mediterranean around 1,000 BCE the collapse of Egyptian and Hittite power had led to the great battles between the Philistines and the Jewish powers under King David: this led us to David’s great Jerusalem projects. That story continues, as does Ireland’s doleful tale of territory and nationhood. All of this chaos in human affairs came back to me last week as I re-read Emily Wilson’s clear and unsentimental translation of Homer’s ODYSSEY (Norton, 2018). Today, thanks to film director Christopher Nolan’s screen version of the Homeric tale, we’ve all been pulled closer to a Greek world of myth-making and story-telling:
‘Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered on the sea….’
Thus begins one of the founding texts of Western civilization, rivalled over time only by the Bible and Dante’s Divine Comedy. All of these great texts speak to human cruelty; all of the texts interrogate the dead, those who died tragically and those who died well-loved. All speak of the capricious nature of human fate, all have suffering, bravery and faithfulness. They are a reminder too of the nature of our human nature, and of the hopelessness of that fond hope that humans might become universally moral and good. Great writing never offers such a simple hope, but it reminds us that human suffering is not likely to end anytime soon; that the human condition is a bitch and we’d better get used to living with it. But some portions of the times we live in become epic, they contain that expanse; expanse of both effect and change. We live in such an era, the days of Agentic AI, a time where tension in this world is like the urgent hours before the midnight of President Kennedy’s ultimatum to Soviet Russia. What the great texts teach us is that we are now living through Book 12 of Homer’s great work, we are inside the Wandering Rocks of AI where even the doves who carry ambrosia to Zeus are lost habitually: that though mankind may have overcome the Sirens of Microsoft, we still must sail though the crushing waves of Amphitrite.
As writers in this era we must maintain our own sense of calm. Creative work is a self-steering mechanism, a counter-magic in a time of chaos. If the chaos of this world is not likely to end any time soon, then projects in writing are moral islands, fed by the mythical doves with a creative ambrosia. Inside the act of making is a kind of optimism, still lurking, still surviving faithfully, like a faithful Penelope. We cannot find calm by looking outward, but something like a moral calm does exist inside the multiple tasks and projects of our artistic life. Perhaps this is why biographers idealize artists, giving them high motives and universal ambitions that we know never existed in the life. How many of us cannot recognise
the writers we knew from their influential biographies? This is because writers flourish in the untilled fields of their own thoughts. They always set to ploughing as if they’d just come back from a war, but it is the war of their own lives. For a writer political ambitions are always suspect things: politics cannot accept irony and the best poetry and prose is nearly always created at the edge of scepticism, in the wheat-field of irony. In art there is never a complete closure, whereas tribal and national politics always yearns for a neat, hopeless closure; closures that are simply culturally impossible. Art knows this.
In the ODYSSEY it is astonishing the number of times our wandering heroes are detained by story-tellers and sooth-sayers and poets. In Book 3 Nestor tells the story of how the Greeks destroyed Troy and were cursed by Athena, In Book 4 Telemachus cries after hearing the Trojan stories of Menelaus, in Book 11 Odysseus himself becomes the story-teller, recounting the tragic story of Agamemnon and of speaking with the ghost of Achilles; in Book 24 Odysseus visits his old father Laertes in the orchard and convincingly reveals himself by telling the story of how in childhood his father had taught him to name all the apple trees. Stories, therefore, are the true counter-magic in our sad time of chaos. And they are magical not because they are mythical but because they are personal. Every child lost in conflict, every son or daughter, is the true subject of poetry. Victims are the true subject of poetry because victims never inherit history. Art runs counter to the political project commonly called ‘history,’ poems refute history in the most abrupt and shameless manner. This sublime personal nature of the art of poetry came back to me also though this summer as, before I picked up Emily Wilson’s THE ODYSSEY, I was immersed in the Eighteenth century poems of Aodhagáin O Rathaille, specifically those poems edited and translated by the very great Rev. Patrick S. Dineen and Tadhg O’Donoghue. First published in 1911 by the Irish Texts Society, this book of poems was revised by Breandán O Buachalla in 2004 of the same Irish Texts Society, then based curiously in the Drummonds Branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland at Admiralty Arch. Ó Rathaille was a master-poet, a genius, with a voice that gave voice to an almost entirely suppressed national literature in the Ireland of the early Eighteenth Century. Ó Rathaille was born around 1670 in the still very Celtic lands of Sliabh Luachra on the county borders of Cork and Kerry. His family were comfortable land-holders, probably lease-holders from the Kenmare estate. Most of his poetry was written between 1700 and 1730, at the time when the great Kenmare estates had not been fully confiscated by the English administration. His family, though Catholic and Irish, seem to have held onto their land holdings for many years, including the townlands of Scrahanaveal and Stagmount. From an Exchequer Bill filed in May, 1701, we know that his family still farmed lands Annaghillymore, ploughlands that were still technically owned by the Gaelic MacCarthy More. Ó Rathaille’s world oscillated between these borderlands of the MacCarthys and the ‘improved’ and cultivated Anglophone estates of Killarney in Co. Kerry.
Ó Rathaille wrote many accomplished and astonishing elegies and laments for dead neighbours, both the landed gentry and the landless. But no poem is more beautiful in its technical precision and verse craft and more powerful in emotion than the magnificent elegy he wrote for the three drowned children of Tadhg O’Cronin ‘Ar Bhás Trír Cloinne Thaidhg Uí Chróinín.’ The first line ‘Do géis an Ráth Mhór, do réabadh a seol’ is nearly untranslatable in its abruptness and shock. That word ‘géis’ means scream, cry, groan, roar, But it is not simply ‘gol’ (cry) or ‘scread’ (scream). It contains something of the swan’s cry at the loss of a cygnet, or some deep rent in the silk of nature. Its effect is deepened in the Irish line by the word ‘réabadh’ which means ‘tearing,’ ‘rending’ or ‘lacerating.’ It is more than physical, it is an emotional violence that the poet captures in its entirety in just one line. But the poem’s effect in Irish continues to deepen in this manner. The word choice in every verse is complex, highly educated, modulated for its emotional music. It is probable that Tadhg’s three beautiful children, Eileen, Diarmuid and Tadhg, drowned in a boating accident while on a picnic in Killarney. Their deaths, so sudden, so unexpected, so unjust, seem like so many deaths of innocent children in the conflict and chaos of our world today. A comfortable, landed family was indeed in full sail, full of happiness, and fate delivered its evil work, ripping, tearing, the full sail of a family. The three named children, insignificant. In history, these names explode across the world of poetry for three centuries. I tried to make my own version of the poem, a vain act for a non-scholar, but an act of homage. Their deaths became epic through the hand of a poet; their story survived, and through their story their names. This is the calm at the heart of making poems, it is our salvation. Here are the first three stanzas of this great poem: for these troubled times:
Three Children Lost
(‘Ar bhás trír cloinne Thaidhg Uí Chróinín’ by Aodhagán O Rathaille)
Rathmore’s heart is ruined, her mainsail torn,
Her affluence diminished, a house exploding with grief;
Such a quick fog descending I cannot see fields,
Upon this mansion of welcomes a horrible disbelief.
More devastating still, this sudden deluge
Carries away all honour, jewels, the rafters, music:
Flames leap to her forehead, flames burn her
Rich beauty, all silken coverlets, all cups of gold.
Senseless sorrow and torture, groin-pain without end,
Deep catastrophe from out west, black fever of illness,
Ache of weeping, o sadness, heart-weariness: a seizure
That Eileen is in graveyard clay, and Diarmuid and Tadhg.
© Thomas McCarthy
Thomas McCarthy was born at Cappoquin, Co. Waterford in 1954 and educated locally and at University College Cork. He was an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing programme, University of Iowa in 1978/79. He has published The First Convention (1978), The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Lost Province (1996), Merchant Prince (2005) and The Last Geraldine Officer (2009) as well as a number of other collections. He has also published two novels and a memoir. He has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry as well as the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries, retiring in 2014 to write fulltime. He was International Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, in 1994/95. He is a former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review. He has also conducted poetry workshops at Listowel Writers’ Week, Molly Keane House, Arvon Foundation and Portlaoise Prison (Provisional IRA Wing). He is a member of Aosdana. His collections, Pandemonium and Prophecy, were published by Carcanet in 2016 and 2019. Last year Gallery Press, Ireland, published his sold-out journals, Poetry, Memory and the Party. Gallery Press published his essays Questioning Ireland in September; and Carcanet published a new collection, Plenitude, in April 2025.