Dialann Bóthair, Liam Ó Muirthile’s second collection of poems in Irish — twelve years after his first, Tine Cnámh (1984) — begins with a number of exquisite lyrics and concludes with an extended sequence, ‘Wolfe Tone’.
Dialann Bóthair is, among other things, a ‘road’ book, a journey’s log in which the poet’s real and imaginative progress to the West Cork Gaeltacht is adumbrated by the actual, historical journey made by Tone to see the same region.