There is an epigraph from Louis MacNeice, about missing one’s connections. In McCarthy’s poem the abandoned trains and stations become symbols of a [then] broader national failure. The ending, with hens occupying the platform and signal box, is comic and bleak.

verse 2 starts: Two hens peck seed from the bright platform, / hens roost in the signal-box. / Bilingual signs that caused a debate in the Senate / have been unbolted and used as gates: / it’s late summer now in this dead station.

The voice in the poem is creating a portrait of a woman named Joanna out of seeds, grains, flowers, and so on. The portrait becomes a meeting point between the body, garden, and poem? www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/medbh-...

By Medbh McGuckian, a Northern Irish poet who tends to explore desire, memory and female identity, this poem is two long verses printed over a bit more than a page of the Penguin anthology.

It certainly hit the author of this blog: emiliqua.blogspot.com/2007/04/seed...

It might also be extensive.

Clonmacnoise is now an OPW site pretty much in the middle of Ireland. It's etensive. Go when the visitor centre is open again. heritageireland.ie/places-to-vi...

Verse 3 shown. Reference is made to Ireland’s ancient kings, warriors, and noble clans buried there. Rolleston is celebrating ancestral history while emphasising silence and the permanence of death.

And Frida Kahlo at Tate Modern in the afternoon. Loved this Emin as Kahlo.

I am told I saw How The Other Half Loves long ago, though I have no memory of it.

Here Marin O'Leary performs a much shorter piano piece derived from it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjTR...

This music apparently evokes imagined rituals around megaliths. It reflects Boydell's interest in Ireland's early past. This was recorded by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and conducted by Colman Pearce in 1995.