'Gleann Maoiliura', Biddy Jenkinson (Critical Essay‪)‬

The poet who writes under the pseudonym of Biddy Jenkinson has explained her reluctance to allow her poetry to be translated into English in Ireland as 'a small rude gesture to those who believe that all can be harvested and stored without loss in an English-speaking Ireland'. (1) We can only speculate about how her work would be received in translation; its depth and resonance might carry over, of they might be lost without some familiarity on the part of the reader with the long and sometimes challenging Irish language poetic tradition. Jenkinson is acknowledged among a certain group of Irish language readers as a poet of exceptional creativity with a particular sensitivity to the tradition in which she writes, one who recasts the literary tradition in a manner that defies the often traumatic effects of the entire post-bardic period. Unhappily, outside that relatively small readership, she has not as yet acquired the status she deserves even within the Irish-speaking world. I have chosen her 'Gleann Maoiliura' ('Glenmalure') for its commitment to the continuing vitality of the Irish literary imagination, through its subtle evocation of certain core strands of literary tradition, and its forceful modernizing of that tradition. (2) The framework in which the poem is set, and which is described in italic font, is the arrival at and departure from the car park at Glenmalure in County Wicklow of a contemporary speaker, identifiable as the poet herself. It is raining, the place is littered, and as a link to the past she carries a copy of the Leabhar Branach, or Book of the O'Byrnes. (3) This is a duanaire or an anthology of poems in praise of, relating to the concerns of, and funded by the O Broin dan whose headquarters were in Glenmalure. The poems in the duanaire were composed by up to thirty-five individual poets, some of them the finest Gaelic poets of the age; they span four generations of O'Byrnes from 1550 to 1630. Fiachadh Mac Aodha O Broin was the revered leader who initially routed the forces of the Pale in the Battle of Glenmalure in 1580 but was overcome several years later and executed. His head was subsequently sent to Queen Elizabeth I in London. Within the framework of the visit by the poem's speaker to the valley of Glenmalure, accompanied by the Leabhar Branach, the bulk of the poem is divided into four sections which present in chronological order the imagined reflections of Rois Ni Thuathail, second wife of Fiachadh Mac Aodha O Broin, on four separate occasions. These are, first, her initial arrival at O Broin's house, newly married and in the depths of an unspecified winter before 1597; second, the night before the battle of Glenmalure in August 1580; third, the period immediately following that victorious battle; and finally, in 1597, the period following O Broin's downfall and execution. The poem ends with a return to the modern speaker, with a dedication of the preceding lines and of her visit to Glenmalure as an explicit act of poetic pietas towards the Gaelic chiefs of the early modern period, and their poets. This affiliation, particularly in the context of the initial invocation of the Book of the O'Byrnes, invites an investigation of the poem's encounter with the literary traditions it reflects, refreshes, and, in some cases, inverts. The principal strands of the tradition that are taken up are the dinnsheanchas or placename lore, political panegyric, and the women's tradition of personal lament.