Ben Keatinge writes: The Amergin Step is a book with many tributaries from the fields of archaeology, myth, folklore, history and literature, but perhaps its unifying principle is that of vision, its way of seeing and interpreting landscape, specifically the Iveragh peninsula in south Kerry. Paddy Bushe has been exploring Iveragh through the eyes and mind for several decades and The Amergin Step is the fruit of a great deal of accumulated experience. It affirms something Tim Robinson wrote in one of his last essays, ‘A Land Without Shortcuts’, where he suggests that it ‘is the attention we bring to it that makes a place out of a location’.
Each guided excursion with Paddy Bushe – a series of explorations on foot, in the mind and from the archive – identifies and traces a new ‘line of vision’. One example, among many, shows how Bushe discovers meaning even in seemingly unremarkable details of the terrain. Climbing ‘to Cloch an Aifrinn [a mass rock], uphill from Spunkane, just north of Waterville’, the landscape becomes ‘very different’ from ground level, giving a sweeping view of ‘Church Island, Inis Uasal’ on Lough Currane from the vantage point of an innocuous ‘low upright slab [. . .] neither prominent nor, at first sight, very impressive’ to the left of the hillside. However, we soon understand that ‘the significance of this slab is in its placing, which makes it another mirador, a place from which to look, to admire, and – especially for the believer – to give credence to the miraculous embodied in the landscape’.
There are many examples in The Amergin Step of this sudden jolt of understanding of how the terrain is configured. In fact, Paddy Bushe does for Iveragh what Tim Robinson did for Connemara, Aran and the Burren in locating ‘a secular version’ of the miraculous by reading the landscape carefully and thus ‘call[ing] forth an awareness of [a] place’s constitution, the casual net that brought it into existence, from cosmic origins to the casual touch of local microhistory’. Taken collectively, these insights have an extraordinary ‘illuminative value’ for the Kerry locales they describe, helping to make sense of what might otherwise appear arbitrary, mere location rather than place.
This holistic sense of recovering meaning by delving into this region’s past and looking more closely at the landscape’s physical contours is also an ethical act of responsibility towards what our ancestors have bequeathed to us. Rather than an exploitative relationship to the world, we might consider, Bushe urges, ‘another way of experiencing the world, a different way of appropriating the world we live in, physically and imaginatively’. The Amergin step of the book’s title is this endeavour to reorientate our approach.
In our current era of climate disaster and biodiversity loss, it seems imperative to find a more responsible, harmonious way of living both with our immediate surrounds and, at the global level, with our whole planetary ecosystem. In this respect, the Amergin poet’s moment of appropriation, making landfall near Paddy Bushe’s house at Carraig Éanna, is reinterpreted, in the book, as a declaration of ecological responsibility:
Am wind on sea
Am wave swelling
Am ocean’s voice
Am stag of seven clashes
Am falcon on cliff
Am sunlit dewdrop […]
An ancient voice addresses contemporary concerns about the custodianship of our planet in what is an ‘inclusive ecological manifesto’ which has never been more needed now that climate change denial is, once again, in the ascendancy in the USA and the green agenda is on the defensive in Europe.
The wide-angled lens of The Amergin Step is also framed in terms of ‘listening to landscape, listening for the stories it tells’. For example, as Bushe surveys Dingle Bay from the top of Drung Hill, he writes of the ‘whispered echoes’ from the past ‘that the attentive listener can still catch on the wind’. And such is the archaeological, geological and historical complexity of this single vantage point, that the listener may pick up ‘the sense of a multitude of different voices to be heard if only we open ourselves to them’. There are abundant examples in the book of how we experience the world aurally and of how the sudden onset of silence, where we expect to hear voices, may carry an extremely sinister resonance, the ‘stillness’, for example, of the recent pandemic, during lockdown, or the “‘terrible, unbearable silence” that arose from the Famine’. In the book’s coda, Paddy Bushe quotes Brendan Kennelly’s great poem ‘My Dark Fathers’ where Kennelly speaks, in the last line of his final stanza, ‘Of unapplauding hands and broken song’. The great silence in the mid-nineteenth century is a sombre reminder that landscape is ‘essentially a human construct’ and that its gaps and missing voices must also be looked for and listened to.
But Bushe encourages us to look forward as well as looking back and another Brendan Kennelly poem, ‘Begin’, resonates strongly with Bushe’s repurposing of the inaugural Amergin step as a positive stepping forwards and onwards. To begin again one must also begin at the beginning which, in Bushe’s imagination, means going back to the Amergin poet and listening to him, for example, on the iPod/iPad, in the twenty-first century:
[. . .] as I had been instructed, I read
Right from the beginning and in the end
I managed to download The Song of Amergin
From the air, and I dived
Deep into the earphones, listening
To the majesty of that synthesis
And to the ancient words of that poet
Who long ago made landfall in my mind.
I walked by myself beside the sea
And deep into the mountains
listening to the wind’s voice on the sea
to the baying wave in a storm
to the hawk’s screech on a cliff
to stags bellowing on the hills
to salmon leaping and falling in a lake
to a bee drowning in the mouth of a flower
to the raven’s croak among mountain
to the celebration of larks over furze
to the wild words of the poet
In order to begin, as has been said
Right at the very beginning.
(‘Amergin on the iPod’)
Tim Robinson’s beautiful coinage of “pre-emptive nostalgia” furnishes us with a phrase to describe how the past informs the present and how looking inward and downwards can shape a productive way forward. And as Brendan Kennelly suggests in ‘Echoing Note’, the preface to his collection Begin (1999), ‘Poetry is a land and sea of echoes connecting with each other [. . .] steppingstones across a river of time [. . .] a kind of education’ which allows for both ‘chronology’ and ‘intensity’ of experience. An intense, breathtaking experience is surely what the incantatory music of ‘Amergin on the iPod’ describes as it delves back into the mists of time in its huge chronological sweep.
The ‘Echoing Note’ traced by Paddy Bushe across Iveragh allows great ‘insight [. . .] into the lives and beliefs of those shadowy figures who inhabited this landscape over the centuries’. Even in the remotest of locations, such as on the majestic island of Skellig Michael, hallmarks of ‘social connectivity, organisation and commonalit’ can be found in ways which suggestively align centre and periphery, past and present. And among Bushe’s many distinctions as a poet is to have written wonderful poems about Skellig – its history, birds, climate, topography – in ways which exemplify his conception of the Amergin step as an act of ethical relationship to the world. Artistic expression is another facet of this harmonious relationship to a ‘unique’ environment, as he explains in the book’s discussion of ‘Skellig Michael as an Island of the Mind’:
At the margin of the known world when it was settled by monks, it is now uninhabited. It is at the same time the centre of its own unique and self-contained world. And for those who manage to enter that world, and especially those who manage to give artistic expression to that world, marginality and centrality tend to resist definition and limitation.
One of the pleasures of Bushe’s explorations on Iveragh is how he combines an awestruck appreciation of ‘the elemental beauty’ of a place like Skellig while insisting on the human and communal dimensions of their enabling isolation. At one extreme, Bushe considers the eremitical austerity of the monks on their ‘fantastic and impossible rock’ out in the Atlantic; at another, he celebrates the ‘Wordsworthian integrity and intensity of vision’ of the O’Connells of Derrynane. But in both cases, he demonstrates their spiritual and communal relation to landscape.
The Amergin Step engagingly overlays, from different angles, the sublimity of the landscapes it describes with their social histories. For example, at Drung Hill, we are told that ‘community, legislation, gathering, identity, energy, buying and selling [. . .] lie behind the enigmatic appearance of the mountain’. Equally, the book expresses present-day concerns about rural depopulation, the need to conserve Iveragh as ‘a living and vibrant community into the future’, anxieties felt all the more keenly given the long-term shadows of ‘language-loss [. . .] cultural impoverishment [. . .] and economic demoralisation’ cast by the Famine.
The social dimension to landscape is equally evident in Bushe’s magnificent poem ‘Stormbound’, about being ‘sucked into the isolation of Sceilg’. Read carefully, one realises how, even as the poem celebrates solitude, it also insists on the need for regular social rhythms so that, instead of surrendering entirely to the spectacle of a storm, the poem returns to a social and spiritual ‘need’:
For the stone steps’ passage
To the high oratories and cells,
For ordained hours, for bells and ritual
That might placate the implacable,
For the final, clear word upon this rock.
(‘Stormbound’)
By looping back to the social and ordinal in a poem filled with intensity, Bushe underlines his dual sense of Iveragh as holding ‘integrity and intensity of vision’ in balance. Ultimately, his vision is Apollonian rather than Dionysian, but the invigorating synthesis of these two modes of perception bolster, with measured urgency, The Amergin Step’s ecological concerns.
26/5/2025
The Amergin Step: An Exploration in the Imagination of Iveragh, by Paddy Bushe, artwork by Holger Lönze, is published by Dingle Publishing, at €30.
