Selected Poems / Rogha Dánta

Máirtín Ó'Direáin was born and raised on the Aran Islands—a world made famous by the writers of the literary revival, chiefly J. M. Synge—but worked in the civil service, first in Galway and then in Dublin for the rest of his adult life. This became the basis of a tension in his work between the rural and the urban. Editor Frank Sewell writes that Ó Direáin's "most important theme" was "the conflict and contradictions (for individuals and nations) that derive from the exchange between tradition