Let the Hare Sit

Lig don nGiorria Suí / Let the Hare Sit is a significant event in Irish poetry publishing – the first extended selection of poems by Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin in a dual-language format. A summary of a journey to date, the book is also an opportunity for those with less than fluent Irish to approach the original poems in the company of their English language translations. Much-admired as “one of the most innovative and interesting voices in contemporary Irish language poetry” (Doireann Ní Ghríofa), Ní Bheildiúin is the author of a rich, myth-informed, yet entirely earthed body of work in which she can describe a school of beached whales as “huge, songless shapes” and address Mount Brandon with such simplicity and directness (“I am too long hardened. Brandon, / have you hardened? And your heart?”) that we almost expect to hear the response. Deftly and faithfully rendered in English by Paddy Bushe, these selected poems are, among other things, an invitation to “stop Dead still Without spilling a drop / From the jug of your heart ...” – the kind of invitation few of us can afford to pass up on.