Smyth, Cherry (2019) Famished. Pindrop Press, Glasgow. ISBN 978-1999355920

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Abstract

This collection is startling. More than that, it is vitally important. Combining lyrical poetry with statistics, quotes, newspaper cuttings, snippets of conversation and even nursery rhymes, it charts the Irish Famine from the potato blight and the impossible poverty that followed, through the disease and death on a massive scale, the political decisions that worsened an already dreadful situation, to the people forced to pay passage to North America and Australia on freight ships, known as ‘coffin ships’. Finally, Cherry Smyth evokes the current day as she describes the journey into her country’s past, its language and the ‘plot of scarcity’ that decimated a nation – a scarcity that bears no little comparison to the plight of political and economic refugees today.

Item Type:	Book
Additional Information:	A book-length poem.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	poetry, poetic sequence, book-length poem, poetry collection, the Irish Famine, British colonialism and Ireland; refugee crisis; coffin ships, potato famine, the potato blight, starvation, migration, Ireland's population
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS)
Related URLs:	Publisher
Last Modified:	17 Jun 2020 03:46
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/23651

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