Songs of the Glens of Antrim

These poems are whispers from a world that existed at the edge of memory even when they were first committed to the page. The Glens of Antrim, that crumpled green corridor running down to the North Atlantic in Northern Ireland, form both landscape and soul of this collection. The dialect renders voices that would otherwise be lost: farmers speaking to their animals, young lovers meeting by the lough, old women remembering what the fairy folk once meant. There is longing here, yes, but also fierce attachment, to land, to language, to the particular quality of light on Antrim hills. The poems move from enchanted lakes hidden in the mist to the plain tragedies of ordinary lives: a broken engagement, a daughter seduced and abandoned, a harvest that failed. This is not polished literary verse meant for salons. It is raw, local, alive with the speech of its people. For readers seeking authentic Irish folk poetry, for those drawn to vanishing dialects and the lyric cry of a place that knew itself intimately, these songs preserve something precious: the voice of a homeland, singing.