Simon Ó Faoláin

The Dingle peninsula in west Kerry, the most southwesterly corner of Ireland’s most southwesterly county, has long held a prominent place in Irish letters.  In the last sixty years some of Irish-language poetry’s most esteemed practitioners – Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, and Seán Ó Ríordáin, for example – have rediscovered their roots and perfected their art in the area. This has ensured the modernity of their poetry, allowing them to craft work based both on a solid vernacular and a uniquely assured and continuous literary heritage. Simon Ó Faoláin, born in Dublin but raised in the peninsula and its surroundings, is the latest poet in this long tradition.

Ó Faoláin was born in 1973 and trained as an archaeologist at the universities of Galway and Aberystwyth, Wales. He is a licensed excavator and has published academic books and articles in the fields of Celtic metallurgy and archaeological mapping. Yet it is as a poet that he is increasingly known – and acclaimed.  Ó Faoláin’s first collection Anam Mhadra was published by Coiscéim in 2008, and introduced a new and strangely assured voice; a mind devoted to poetry, unafraid of both formal learning and experimentation. Its achievement was recognised when Ó Faoláin won both the Glen Dimplex and the Strong awards for best first collection, despite the difficulty of achieving a level playing field for untranslated work in Irish, by far the smaller of Ireland’s two official languages.

Ó Faoláin's second collection, As Gaineamh, sees his profession of archaeologist and status as father fuse with his vocation as poet in an ancient and – seemingly – dying language. The book sees his language increase in sinewy strength and the widening of his intellectual, cultural and social reference points: no other poet could compare the small irregular hillside fields with cancerous cells on a screen.

As Gaineamh reveals a view of time that is both postmodern and traditionally Celtic. In a poem about the excavation of a Viking ship, prefaced by a quotation in French from Samuel Beckett, Ó Faoláin writes Triallfam amárach ar inné arís or ‘tomorrow we will again go to yesterday’. Irish poetry is fortunate that it has, in Ó Faoláin, a practitioner with the rigorous intellectual honesty necessary to both probe its past and point the way to its future.
Bibliography

Anam Mhadra, Coiscéim, Dublin, 2008
As Gaineamh, Coiscéim, Dublin, 2011