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Dain Do Eimhir: Poems for Eimhir (English and Scots Gaelic Edition)

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Sorley MacLean, Dain do Eimhir (University of Glasgow Press, 2002)

Actually, I shouldn't be attributing this book to Sorley MacLean. Of its two hundred seventy-four pages, less than an hundred were actually written by MacLean. Christopher Whyte, the editor of the book, wrote most of it. And in its way, it's rather an impressive thing. How does one write six pages of commentary on one line of a poem?

But the central piece of the book is MacLean's "greatest achievement" (as per the cover), the poem cycle Dain do Eimhir (Poems to Eimhir-- Eimhir, by the by, being the wife of Cuchulainn). And thus the obvious question follows. How are the poems?

The concise answer to that question is "unpoetic." MacLean obviously did not come from the "show, don't tell" school of thought. (Whyte realizes this, at least subconsciously, as he attributes some of the difficulties of translating some of MacLean's poems to the frequency with which MacLean uses abstract nouns; abstraction, of course, is anathema to poetry.) MacLean is constantly talking about how beautiful his addressee(s) is(are), but the only concrete detail about her/them we ever get is hair color. (In fact, Whyte's assertion that there's more than one Eimhir stems solely from this one detail.) Poetry doesn't tell us something is beautiful, poetry shows us something is beautiful. Otherwise, it's prose (and unacceptably vague prose, at that) chopped up into short lines, whether it rhymes or not.

Mildly interesting for the scholarship Whyte attaches, but the poetry, well, isn't. **