Seeing What’s Hidden by Manchán Magan: Author’s last words mingle trademark lyricism and rigour

Seeing What’s Hidden: Uncovering Ireland’s Ancient Ways of Knowing

Author: Manchán Magan

ISBN-13: 9781804586013

Publisher: Gill

Guideline Price: €22.99, 320pp

Those Who Listen: New Irish Writing on the Bog

Author: Alice Kinsella (ed.)

ISBN-13: 9781914596582

Publisher: Mayo Books

Guideline Price: €15; 116pp

In his introduction to Manchán Magan’s Seeing What’s Hidden, Robert Macfarlane encapsulates Magan’s relationship with our world. Our existence, Macfarlane writes, “is an ongoing, unfurling, iridescent miracle, happening around and within us every moment”; and our connection with our surroundings can be renewed by being aware of the lives of tree, stone, river, and of the myriad ways in which these lives intersect with our own.

Magan himself – in these, the last words we shall have from him – continues this thread, arguing with his trademark mingling of lyricism and rigour that the Irish have all the tools necessary – language, lore, deep knowledge – to rediscover this miracle.

The experiences of a history of colonisation have traumatised the land, Magan observes, but have by no means ruptured the connections between nature and people. The book was unfinished at the time of Magan’s death, but a sequence of satisfying essays by Merlin Sheldrake, Kerri Ní Dochartaigh and others complete a luminous text.

[ Manchán Magan’s final part of his trilogy: Ireland was believed to be the outer limit of the known worldOpens in new window ]

Magan’s ideas are also taken up and explored in the series of moving texts gathered by Alice Kinsella in Those Who Listen. Kinsella’s fine introduction addresses the layered relationship between the Irish and our bog landscapes, with the latter regarded as simultaneously a place of work, nature, secrets, history and potential menace, “as both a living presence and a site of labour, memory, and culture” – and each of these layers is amply explored in the work that follows.

“Oh Christ, it was misery,” writes Belinda McKeon in Endless, remembering the exhausting labour associated with the bog, “I wish I could pretend otherwise, but when I think about the rows of turf and how they stretched out into the future, I can feel it still in my back and in my legs.”

Dean Black’s Bog Bodies addresses directly the tortured relationship between the Troubles and the bog; while other pieces echo Magan’s call for a renewed relationship between humans and world, completing the circle with stirring lyricism. As Jane Clarke reminds us in Large Marsh Grasshopper, all we need do is pay attention: “Somewhere a grasshopper / clings to white beak-sedge. / Yellow-green with red legs / and black knees, he flicks / his tibia against the tips / of flexed wings. Somewhere / a grasshopper sings.”