In this powerful, evocative collection, master storyteller John O’Donohue explores themes of love and loss, beginnings and endings.
Inspired by the ancient wisdom of the Celtic tradition and the rugged, majestic landscape of his birth, the west of Ireland, here he also creates a unique vision of a place and time, and the echo of a memory that will never fade.
TRANSWORLD IRELAND
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ECHOES OF MEMORY
A TRANSWORLD IRELAND BOOK: 9781848270749
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448110599
First published in 1994 by Salmon Publishing Ltd.
This edition first published in 2009 by Transworld Ireland, a division of Transworld
Publishers
Transworld Ireland paperback edition published 2010
Copyright © John O’Donohue 1994, 2009
Foreword copyright © Lelia Doolan 2009
John O’Donohue has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
1 AIR HOLDS ECHO
Nowhere
Taken
After the Sea
Raven
Beannacht
November Questions
Uaigneas
Lull
Fossil
Woman and Steel
2 HUNGERS OF DISTANCE
Purgatorial
Exiled Clay
Instead of Kissing the Cross …
Anything Can Come
Young Mind
Broken Moon
Expectation
Nothingness: The Secret of the Cross
Self-Distance
Ich wünsche mir
Cottage
The Voyage of Gentians
Betrayed by Light
Voices at the Funeral
I – Body
II – Grave
III – Coffin
IV – Forgetfulness
3 CLAY HOLDS MEMORY
Exposed
Origins
Raid
Damage: A Conamara Cacophony
Gleninagh
Selves
Tropism
Outside Memory
Chosen
4 ICONS OF LOVE
Nets
The Grief of Love
Invocation
Frail Shelter
Afterwards
Jealousy
Skeletal
Messenger of Sight
Moon Blessing
Nothing Else Matters
Love Notes
Found
From the Womb Before the Dawn
Conamara in Our Mind
Arrival
Index of First Lines
About the Author
Also by John O’Donohue
Copyright
John O’Donohue, Ph.D., was born in County Clare in 1956. He spoke Gaelic as his native language and lived in a remote cottage in the west of Ireland until his untimely death in January 2008. A highly respected poet and philosopher, he lectured in Europe and America and wrote a number of international bestsellers: Anam Cara, Eternal Echoes, Divine Beauty and Benedictus, which he completed shortly before he died. He also wrote two collections of poetry, Conamara Blues and Echoes of Memory, his first published work.
For more information on John O’Donohue and his books, please visit his website at www.johnodonohue.com
Sending a first book out into the world is a brave enterprise, especially when its destination is the crowded thickets of Irish literature. Echoes of Memory was not John O’Donohue’s first published writing. He had been contributing philosophical and critical articles on religion, folklore and literature to Irish journals since his time as a student in the seminary at Maynooth, near Dublin. But in 1994, after his first years in public ministry as a Roman Catholic priest, he was entering that rich vein of creativity which led in the following year to his beautifully lyrical essays on the elements, published as four separate little books and, in 1997, to his memorable Anam Ċara.
It is hard to believe that his seventh book, Benedictus