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A recasting of the Deirdre fable, Eamon Carr’s verse play refracts his experience as a reporter on the North in the 1990s. Ceasefire reality and myth intersect in shades of brutality and terror. Greek theatre and Japanese Noh infrastructure frame the Celtic story and convey feelings about the Troubles too strong for professional journalism. The book’s theatrical terrain is inhabited by the ghosts of the doomed heroine and Conor the king, an old woman and a masked chorus. The former Horslip captures a story of conflict and desire largely through the device of a jaded and traumatised reporter. The language has a bony and terse eloquence that borrows from myth but frames the terrible recent reality of North Ireland. “There will not be enough water in the lough to wash away the blood / There will not be enough mourners to lament those who fall / There will not be enough breath in the air for the list of the dead / . . . There will not be enough gods to beseech for mercy.”
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