Connemara and Other Countries is a selection of poems written between 2015 and 2025. They have been gleaned and garnered from several generations of obsolete laptops; recopied from the backs of envelopes; found deep in the bags and pockets of yesteryear; reclaimed from the margins and inside covers of books and tatty notebooks and brought together as a record of a momentous decade of discovery and revelation.
The Gaelic language is the cornerstone of the collection. On this cornerstone a larger edifice has been erected, an edifice at once Celtic and European, esoteric and altruistic.
There are poems in the poet’s mother tongue, Welsh, the most sinewy and classical of the Celtic family; in Breton, the earthiest and pithiest of them; poems in German, the greatest poetic language of the emerging modern Europe; poems in French, a language a little like a deflated balloon, but colourful enough and enriched with its own singular mixture of arrogance and argot; poems in English, a lonely ogre of a poetic sitting in the garret of an ailing civilisation.
Diarmuid Johnson is a well-known figure in literary and musical circles in Ireland and abroad. In Conamara agus Tíortha Eile (Connemara and Other Countries), his eighth collection of poems, he takes us on lyrical odyssey through Ireland, Wales and much of western Europe, weaving together in a unique work the experiences of a monumental decade of discovery and revelation. Welcome to a prismatic horizontal and stateless collection.
“Fiaire feá é Johnson a bhfuil de phribhléid againne seal a chaitheamh ina fhochair ar a fhánaíocht dó.” — Darragh Ó Caoimh, Breac
