Daragh Breen

What the Wolf Heard Daragh Breen

In the opening Lighthouses section of this volume the west coast of Ireland is recast as a kind of Burroughsian Land of the Dead, with the ghost-lights from defunct lighthouses mixing with those of the automated in a sequence that slowly allows itself to be decoded. Ned Kelly, given his own requiem, is found morphing in and out of a lupine-self following the destruction of the last wolf in Ireland and a period which saw the mass-banishment of many of the country's underclasses to the new British antipodean colonies. Other poems are suggestive of a bestiary, presenting various animals that have been damaged and reformed by their current environment.