More on the poetry of Niall McElwee – and his former boss John Ennis. Oisin’s Journey Home was published in 2006 by School of Humanities at Waterford I. T. and Centre for Child and Youth Care Learning at Athlone I.T. and was launched in Newfoundland. I still don’t know what the interest in poetry is or the relevance for the Centre for Child and Youth Care Learning is?
This review in the Munster Express looks at the work in more detail.
There is a huge nostalgia market out there for and bus travel at the moment. Travis Elborough on Granta cashed in on the Routemaster double-decker bus with The Bus We Loved. The fascination with railways is booming with books on Russian gulag trains doing big business as is the current hit Ghost Train Through The Andes. About the author Michael Jacobs, tracing the Chile-Bolivian railway from letters his grandfather sent home. There is an undimmed magic of hope and dreams from Antofagasta to Chocaiabamba across the harsh Atacama desert of Chile to the lush Bolivian uplands.
In my own small way I still have happy moments about the now defunct Tramore Railway, and when I opened the two long poems in the one book about the Newfoundland railway, under the title Oisin’s Journey Home, I could sense what inspired John Ennis and Niall McElwee.
John Ennis in his beautiful heartfelt poem subtitled, A Keen At The Gates Of The Heart, continues his inspirational links and journeys in Newfoundland. He grew up in the midlands where his uncle Larry was a railway man with his flag stickler, breast pocket watch and whistle. Ennis carries this romance of memory with little or no reference to Celtic Mythology to embrace the personae of hardworking engineers coming from Pertshire in Scotland and other far-flung places to build bridges in Sydney, in Ottawa, spanning the Rio Grande, part of Lake Superior and the Grand Rapids.
In his poem there are campfires of one thousand men, fiddlescrapes of tunes, old snorers, teenearners, men whose lives are inbetween or nowhere beneath tarpaper. He elevates in poetry labourers into interpreters of nationhood – section-men, pick-men, shovel-men, dynamiters in desolate places with exotic names. He praises the railway for bringing poetry and Al Pittman, fine arts and drama to Corner Brook in western Newfoundland.
Before he finishes, the railcars are gone in an eloquence of political promises as the rolling stock is exiled (sold off) to Chile, Bolivia, Antofagasta.
The second long poem in this book is Scenes from the Canadian Railway Logbook by Athlone academic Niall McElwee, who takes on the Oisin myth from Tir Na hOige as he poetically becomes Oisin riding the rails of memory and nostalgia. McElwee captures the vastness of Canada where in British Columbia it took 22,000 men to construct 600 bridges and threstles and to blast 27 tunnels through the mountains in a world where developers paid the First Nations people with the wrappers from tin cans.
It is a fine companion piece to the Ennis poem, but at times it tries too hard to take in big themes, and big issues. McElwee uses Oisin by placing a sine fada over the O to pronounce it Osheen and seems to ignore O Hogain (Irish scholar) and MacLennan (who was first holder of the Chair of Celtic Studies, University of Ottawa) who used the unusual version Usheen. Then again it is surprising to see an academic using wikiperia as a reference source.
The book was published by School of Humanities at Waterford I. T. and Centre for Child and Youth Care Learning at Athlone I.T. and was launched in Newfoundland
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