Kenneth Steven has retold the tragic Celtic myth of Deirdre of the Sorrows in a delicate, lyrical, sequence of the same name. The Irish girl Deirdre, promised to the High King, escaped to Argyll with her lover Naoise, but after an idyllic spell together in their coastal refuge they were hunted down to an inevitable fate. Here is a fragment from the narrative. (Polygon, £8.99)
from DEIDRE OF THE SORROWS
One day the sun woke her –
she slipped outside a time, marvelling at the light.
~
Where the stream chattered into the sea
an otter was busying itself with a fish.
~
There was a thatch of birdsong; she held her breath
for the moss voice of a cuckoo.
~
She thought of her sisters and for a moment
saw them laughing as they ran to find her;
~
at their back her drowned father,
the soft shyness of his smile.
~
But there was no one. She sat
and the sun came in butter yellow;
~
She felt her face warm
for the first time she could remember –
~
A hundred tributaries shone from the melting snow;
and there, the first bowed heads of snowdrops.
~
And suddenly she realised that she missed him –
she picked one for Naoise, then ran and ran to find him.
~
(The next poem describes how Naoise has tried in vain to gather enough gold to make a wedding ring, and bowed and bedraggled comes back to her.)
Do not despair, she said –
The sun will be our wedding ring.
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