Lays from the West

On the prairie, flowers crowd the fields and the sky is clear—yet the speaker’s heart keeps crossing an ocean to Ireland. What can a new land offer against the remembered shade of beeches by Lough Neagh, the lark’s song, and a church bell on Sabbath morning?

M. A. Nicholl’s late-nineteenth-century poems travel between the western prairie and Ireland’s familiar glens, fields, and shores. In the opening lyric, a speaker surrounded by strange beauty longs for the home left behind; elsewhere, love, bereavement, and the passing years turn memory into both solace and ache. These verses ask what remains when youth and hope fade, and whether the past can keep its light across years and distance. As the prairie dusk gathers, will those remembered scenes comfort the lonely heart—or make its longing sharper?

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