There is a particular kind of book that refuses to behave itself. It will not resolve its arguments, will not settle its identities, will not offer the reader the comfort of a finished position. New Green Fool is that kind of book – and its refusal is its achievement.
Part essay, part memoir, part ethical rehearsal, New Green Fool circles Irishness without trying to possess it. Again and again, moments that seem poised to crystallise into identity dissolve instead into uncertainty. The hedgerow, Cunningham notes, is “only ever recollected by the listing of its parts”, suggesting a culture increasingly reduced to labels and inventories rather than lived attention.
At the book’s core is an ongoing dialogue with Patrick Kavanagh’s The Green Fool. Cunningham describes encountering the book again in 2013 and finding that it still exerted force.
What emerges is a sustained attention to language itself, and to the question of whether we still care for words at all. That attention is shaped through a weave of quotations from Kavanagh and other writers, critical reflection and intimate autobiographical moments.
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Cunningham walks through Wexford lanes, London and Berlin streets, memory and doubt. These walks are deliberately unheroic. At one point Cunningham realises he is “enjoying the countryside – all alone”. Solitude here is neither romantic nor redemptive; it is simply the condition in which attention becomes possible.
The later sections deepen this ethic of refusal. Memory begins to fail. Tombstones cannot be located. Stories slip. “Sometimes you have to let such memories ... fall away like dead leaves in autumnal parks anyway.”
By the final pages, the title phrase comes fully into focus. To be a “new green fool” is not to adopt a persona but to accept a condition: to live without false settlement. “I am not really Irish, no, and yet ... will therefore never not be Irish neither,” Cunningham concludes, refusing both purity and escape.
Sovereignty, as Cunningham encounters it, is less about reigning over circumstances than about recognising the forces that govern us – and deciding, however tentatively, how we might live in relation to them.
For anyone drawn to questions of language, identity and what it means to live with depth rather than certainty, New Green Fool is a book of quiet beauty and real, lasting value.
