Category Archives: Irish Poets and Poetry

Fintan Vallely gets down to brass tacks in his new book

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Dublin can be heaven if you are seeking cultural stimulation, and the Hodges Figgis’ bookshop is a good place to look. In June, I was fortunate to be there for the book launch of Camarade by my friend, Theo Dorgan. The audience was studded with poets, writers, scholars, musicians, and sundry cognoscenti: I was perhaps the most anonymous attendee. I sat next to a distinguished-looking gentleman with a lilting Northern accent. We chatted amiably, but initially I did not catch his name.

Imagine my astonishment, then, when I realized I was talking with Fintan Vallely, Ireland’s preeminent expert on Irish traditional music and a highly accomplished flute player. He has been writing, speaking, teaching, and advocating for traditional music for over fifty years. I have a decent collection of his writing, suitably curated in the title photograph. I have relied upon his books and articles as sources of sound information (especially the series of Companion Guides), stimulation, and writing inspiration.

His newest book, Beating Time: The Story of the Irish Bodhrán, explores the history of Ireland’s favored percussion instrument. The frame drum is not nearly as old as many people think. Vallely dates its high-profile arrival in Irish music to 1959, when it featured in the music for Sive, John B. Keane’s play, at the Abbey Theater. Sean O’Riada was the Abbey’s music director, and he was drawn to the drum’s possibilities. He made room for a bodhran player, Peadar Mercier, when he created a new ensemble, “ceili” band, Ceoltóirí Chualann  (“The Band that Changed the Course of Irish Music”) in 1961.

The new book features vivid portraits by Jacques Piraprez Nutan and James Fraher and an extraordinary array of archival material, photos, and illustrations. Vallely establishes the tambourine as the origin of the drum. There is little evidence that it was present or necessary historically in the deeply melodic traditions of Irish music, Vallely asserts. However, improvised drums were fashioned from frames used for winnowing and sifting, particularly by Wrenboys on St. Stephen’s Day.

His book is suffused with organic intelligence. There are no artificial ingredients. Every chapter is rigorously researched, carefully arranged and annotated, and beautifully presented. The writing smoothly weaves dazzling details into the larger narrative. He is a Master collaborator. Each edition of the Companion guides involves contributions from dozens of musicians and music scholars. He is generous in his credits and acknowledgements and wears his erudition lightly.

Nicholas Carolan, former Director of the Irish Traditional Music Archive, introduced Vallely’s book at the Willie Clancy Summer School this July. He said Vallely had tirelessly researched the bodhran for many years and drew from a great range of recently digitized information. “He’s produced here both a definitive history of the Irish drum, and also an exemplar, a template for writing the social and musical history of other instruments of Irish traditional music.”  On that last point, the concertina would be an excellent topic.

My favorite among Vallely’s works is Blooming Meadows, The World of Irish Traditional Musicians, a book of 30 interviews and portraits of Irish musicians published in 1998. Co-written with Charlie Piggott and featuring Nutan’s photographs and a “borrowed’ bar stool, the book is a treasure of lore and legends. The timely book offered a wealth of stories on long-established musicians, including Joe Burke, Ann Conroy, Paddy Canny, Joe Cooley, Lucy Farr, and Ben Lennon. It features many others who were on the cusp of greater recognition: Martin Hayes, Sharon Shannon, Liz Carroll, and Brendan Begley, among others. The format of short essays paired with a good image was one inspiration for my blog when I started it in 2008.

His other works in my collection are Tuned Out, a comprehensive and authoritative (like all Vallely’s writing) exploration drawn from interviews with musicians of how Irish traditional music fell out of favor with many Northern Protestants, regrettable collateral damage in the political polarization wrought by The Troubles. Sing Up is a humorous, clever collection of Irish comic and satirical songs. It’s got a whole section called Goatery and Percussion with songs about the bodhran.

Arguing at the Crossroads goes back to 1997 with ten essays on a changing Ireland. Vallely’s essay surveyed the state of Irish music at that point (post-Riverdance) and found it in rude health. The Local Accent, Selected Proceedings from BLAS also dates from 1997, and includes his provocative essay, The Migrant, the Tourist, the Voyeur, the Leprechaun. Vallely edited Crosbhealach An Cheoil (The Crossroads Conference, 1996) with Hammy Hamilton, Eithne Vallely & Liz Doherty.

Vallely is a walking/talking encyclopedia of Irish traditional music. In our brief conversation at the book launch, he summarized the key points of his bodhran research, mentioned his studies of The Princess Grace Song-Sheet Collection in Monaco (an astounding piece of catalogue work), and described the evolution of the Third Companion Guide into recordings on CD and DVD. He also gave me a copy of his 2021 CD, Merrijig Creek, an enchanting album of his compositions and arrangements with a powerhouse set of musical partners: his sister, Sheena, on flute, Caoimhin Vallely, their cousin, on piano, Liz Doherty and Gerry O’Connor on fiddles, Daithi Sproule on guitar, and Brian Morrissey on, you guessed it, the bodhran.

Vallely is an ubiquitous presence in the Irish music literature. I like to think of him as a key “influencer” before it was a popular or profitable role. Beating Time has everything you would want to know about the bodhran (including brass tacks) and much more that you may find intriguing and enlightening.

Links and additional sources:

All of Vallely’s prodigious work, books, recordings, articles, and other musical projects can be found at his website imusic.ie:

https://imusic.ie/

Irish arts suffered a tremendous loss this month with the untimely death of Sean Rocks, the voice of arts coverage on Irish radio for 20 years. Here are two short clips from his RTE programme, Arena:

First, an interview with Fintan Vallely about Beating Time.

https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22533245/

And, second, Sean Rocks interview with Theo Dorgan discussing his new novel, Camarade.

https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22529307/

Another Honest Ulsterman Departs

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Michael Longley

The news of Michael Longley’s death today prompted me to search through the blog archives for my review of books by Longley and Ciaran Carson. Carson died in 2019, and Longley has now departed. Many tributes will be paid to Longley over the next few days and weeks. The Irish President, Michael D. Higgins, led the way in today’s Irish Times:

Michael worked to give space and actuality to the moral imperative that we must live together with forbearance, with understanding, with compassion and insight, and above all else, perhaps, with hope.

One of the first pieces I wrote for The Irish Herald in San Francisco in May 2000, at the instigation of Elgy Gillespie and Catherine Barry, was a review of two books of their poetry. This edited version appeared in the blog in August 2010, and I reproduce it here as a small tribute to Longley’s work and genius.

The Honest Ulstermen


A review of The Twelfth of Never by Ciaran Carson; Wake Forest University Press, 1998, and The Weather in Japan by Michael Longley, Cape Poetry, Jonathan Cape, 2000.


I first came to Carson’s poetry through his prose. Last Night’s Fun (North Point Press, 1996) is a masterly piece of work, arguably the finest book ever written about the mysteries of the music-making process. His new book of poetry, The Twelfth of Never, continues in that vein. He uses tune titles –notoriously misleading in the Irish tradition- for many poems. He poetically plagiarizes many old ballads, twisting and turning familiar lines into a darker tapestry such as this from The Rising of the Moon:

The pale moon was rising above the green mountain,
The red sun declining beneath the blue sea,
When I saw her again by yon clear crystal fountain,
Where poppies, not potatoes, grew in contraband.


Carson writes like a man possessed. The Twelfth of Never reads like it was written in one passionate, pellucid night when the words flowed freely, and his magpie mind couldn’t be stopped. And, as if living in the North was not strange enough, Carson’s forays into Japanese culture bring him to locations where he finds,
The labyrinth to which I hadn’t got the key.

Poetry is, at its best, an intellectual and emotional con game. The poet hopes to trick us into thinking anew about things or rethinking familiar things by sleight-of-word. Carson riffs, raps, trips, traps, rocks, and rolls our perceptions in his poetry.  In The Display Case, Carson seems to express some regret that his oeuvre is nearly all in English, not his native Irish language. But this is English writing that could only emerge from an Irish consciousness,
Where everything is metaphor and simile (Tib’s Eve).

Carson’s poems are odes to complexity, a dissection of that hairball of historic proportions, that nest of co-dependent hostilities that is Northern Ireland. And discussion of Northern Irish poetry is no less fraught with difficulty, a minefield sown with words.

Both Carson and Longley are distinctly Northern Irish. Longley describes being there as living in three places at once: one partly Irish, one partly English and one that’s “…also its own awkward self.”  Each covers the touchstones of Northern identity and the struggle of people to lead normal lives in the mayhem, including their efforts to play an artist’s role in a society given more to ideology than to introspection.

Both are famous as the artists that stayed home, laboring in the bloody northern field. They served long stints with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland before retiring in recent years to focus on their writing. As John Hume has noted (Arguing at the Crossroads, 1998), Northern artists were mainly responsible for keeping the flame of diversity and multi-culturalism alive during the years of strife and political polarization.

In All of These People, Longley ruminates:

Who was it who suggested that the opposite of war
Is not so much peace as civilisation? He knew
Our assassinated Catholic greengrocer who died
At Christmas in the arms of our Methodist minister.


The North, despite George Mitchel’s valiant efforts to impose some American pragmatism, remains an immensely complex place where words can and do explode –just think of the recent haggling over “decommissioning.” As Fintan O’Toole noted in the New Yorker (The Meanings of Union, April 27, 1998), crafting agreements in the North will require a poet’s skill, not a pragmatist’s words.

The ancient words of the Persian poet Rumi seem particularly pertinent to the current impasse in the North of Ireland.

Out beyond ideas of
Right doing and wrong doing
There is a field.
I’ll meet you there.


And if the Catholic and Protestant diehards ever make it out to that field, they’ll find Michael Longley and Ciaran Carson waiting to have words with them. High kudos to them for these collections. I can think of no two better Irish people to lead the charge of the write brigade across the field of new Irish dreams.