Connemara, Co. Galway, Ireland – The Landscape of Poetry – Poems by Mary O’Malley

Connemara
county Galway
Ireland
Nigel Borrington
2019

Connemara, Co. Galway

Mary O’Malley is truly the person who has written Connemara, her writing laced with the fierce beauty of the landscape, and the sounds of the sea. In ‘Porpoises’ she sends our minds out to sea from the most westerly point of the county:

The sky is close.

Out from the once manned rock

White electric light

Arcs over the Water

Difficult not to agree with her when she states that the sea is “just the place from which all things make sense”.

Pierce Hutchinson, also writing on Connemara, said:

There are chinks between

the neat stones to let the wind through safe,

You can see the blue sun through them.

But coming eastward in the same county,

the walls grow higher, dark grey;

an ugly grey. And the chinks disappear:

through those walls you can see nothing.

Perhaps our poetic landscapes remind us of that – to keep our hearts alert for experiences of water, wind and wonder.