Cinderbiter
Celtic Poems
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- £7.49
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
Dramatic new retellings of Celtic poetry’s great lyrics and legends
Cinderbiter collects tales and poems originally composed and performed centuries ago in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, when notions of history and authorship were indistinguishable from the oral traditions of myth and storytelling. In the spirit of recasting these legends and voices for new audiences, celebrated mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw and award-winning poet Tony Hoagland have created extraordinary new versions of these bardic lyrics, folkloric sagas, and heroes’ journeys, as they have never been rendered before.
In long, shaggy tales of the unlikely ascensions of previously unknown heroes such as Cinderbiter, in the shrouded origin stories of figures such as Arthur and Merlin, and in anonymous flickering lyrics of elegy, praise, and heartbreak, these poems retain at once the rapturous, supernatural imagination of the deep past layered with an austere, devout allegiance to the Christian faith. Shaw and Hoagland’s collaboration summons the power within this storehouse of the Celtic mind to arrive at this rare book—distinctive, audacious, and tuned to our time and condition with a convincing resonance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the foreword to this lyrical collection of stories in verse and poems, Shaw, a mythologist and storyteller, recalls an afternoon spent with Hoagland (who died in late 2018) looking out at the Irish Sea. There, the joint project, which he remarks has "an oral liveliness to the way the lines skip and twist in their stanzas," found its origins in a discussion of the story "Cinderbiter." The result is a book of reinvented bardic lyrics and folkloric sagas. Gems among these include "Deirdre Remembers a Scottish Glen," a poem full of stunning descriptions of setting: "Glen of my body's feeding:/ crested breast of loveliest wheat,/ glen of the thrusting lorn-horn cattle,/ firm among the trysting bees." The speaker describes the glen full of "badgers, delirious with sleep, heaped fat in dens" and "sentried with blue-eyed hawks,/ greenwood laced with sloe, apple, blackberry" before concluding with the striking, resounding final line: "To remember is a ringing pain of brightness." These wonderful retellings will introduce readers to new and enchanting stories told in a lush, musical way.
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