Writing the Wind - A Celtic Resurgence: The New Celtic Poetry.

Roy, G. Ross

Thomas Rain Crowe, Gwendal Denez, Tom Hubbard, eds. Cullowhee, N.C. New Native Press. 1997. xvi + 335 pages. $14.50. ISBN 1-883197-12-0.

Several years ago I heard a radio broadcast of the last native speaker of Manx, so I was not prepared to find poems in this language in Thomas Rain Crowe's book with its secondary subtitle The New Celtic Poetry, because I had already relegated Manx, along with Cornish, to the limbo of dead languages. I was wrong.

A short introduction by Crowe is followed by sections with their own introductions by separate contributors for each of the six languages: Welsh, Breton, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, and Manx. There are translations, usually by the author, published with the originals. None of these native languages has had an easy time of it in the face of governments' insistence on the "official" language of the country with little encouragement for keeping a secondary language alive. Perhaps nothing highlights my statement better than to read the impressive list of acknowledgments for aid in producing the volume - only one government agency contributed, and it will not go unnoticed that Writing the Wind was published in the USA.

It is interesting to note "Negro Song" by Per Denez: "I am a Breton / I have been a slave / . . . / I have killed black people / . . . / I have been a servant." The poem ends tellingly - "I have taught people to speak the language of my masters... I have been a martyr" - because Denez was a teacher. This disconnectedness can be observed as well in an Irish poem, "Stranger," by Michael O'Siadhail, where we find, "A youngster I came [to] . . . a land without a tongue." "Going Home" for Iain Crichton Smith, a Scottish islander, echoes the same feeling: "Tomorrow I shall go home to my island / trying to put a world into forgetfulness." He cannot forgive the eviction of crofters to turn the land over to raising sheep in the nineteenth century. "We will remember this," he warns in "The Clearances." The folk memory runs deep in Wales too, as Menna Ellyn reminds us in "Message": "Welsh people . . . please listen. / Let us vanish / off the Earth's crust / with the dignity of people / and the tongue of a human race." Perhaps the most ravaged of the Celtic nations is Cornwall, and Garfield Richardson chronicles the despoiling in a mournful poem, where each stanza begins with the words "What are they doing to my Cornwall now?" The end is cautious: "Yet I have hope, but no guarantee / That what I hope will ever be."

Sorley MacLean (who died in 1996) stated in an earlier work that Celtic poetry "has . . . more than common realism," giving the lie to those who would perpetuate the Celtic Twilight idea. "The Great Famine" foresees "a destruction far more . . . than the fire and brimstone . . . that poured on the Cities of the Plain." Cutting to the quick, he asks: "Does Nature not care at all / and is Predestination cold-hearted and cruel?" We note too the impact of modern times in such poems as Rody Gorman's "Beside the North Sea," in which the melancholy of a lost love is lamented "like memory / Like light / From an oilrig on a distant shore."

In the face of globalization, Writing the Wind makes a case for minor languages. Thomas Rain Crowe, writing for all three editors, concludes the introduction with the word resurgence, striking a cautiously hopeful note, calling his anthology "a kind of note-in-a-bottle." We must all trust that the bottle will be picked up and the message acted upon.

G. Ross Roy University of South Carolina