Birds again. Birds inescapable at this time of year. In the garden more blackbirds swooping and scuttling than ever; the robins and dunnocks splashing in the bird bath, an occasional goldcrest. A man up from the midlands asked: "Can you hear that chiff-chaff? And that blackcap?" Birds are everywhere in Frank O'Connor's splendid Kings Lords and Commons, Irish poems from the seventh century on, translated by himself. The blackbird and the cuckoo are well mentioned, but The Hermit's Song, seventh century, which he introduces with the words "It is extraordinary how clear and bright the landscape of early Irish poetry is, as though some mediaeval painter had illustrated it, with its little oratories hung with linen, its woodlands and birds, its fierce winters and gay springs." This poem has the pigs and goats and badgers and deer that you might expect, foxes too, salmon and salmon, herbs and berries "haws and strawberries" and a litany of bird activity: Dainty redbreasts briskly forage/Every bush/Round and round my hut there flutter/Swallow, thrush. And geese and duck in autumn, while he always has the "angry wren, officious linnet and blackcap". And on and on, the list cunningly running so that it has nothing of the bareness of a simple string of names.
In another poem (one of the songs of Sweeney) the voices of the birds are sweeter to him "than any churchbell's ringing". The cuckoo's voice is strident: "Welcome summer great and good." And this poem also brings in the corncrake, "a bustling bard". And the bird that sings of all this "frightened, foolish, frail" is the lark "that flings its praise abroad". Winter: Chill, Chill: "The old eagle of Glen Rye, even he forgets to fly." This book was published first in Canada and the United States in 1959 then in the United Kingdom in the same year, according to the copyright statement. How many times since, you wonder? Yeats helped; "indeed, wild horses could not have kept Yeats from helping with them". Published this side of the Atlantic by Macmillan. There is also a small collection by the Dolmen Press, The Little Monasteries, 1963 and 1976. Less than 50 pages.
And it's still spring outside in 1999 and nowhere is there a more original evocation of the seasons than in these two works, and he does not fail to give credit and deference to others in the field.