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THE KEYS TO THE COTTAGE: STORIES FROM THE WEST OF IRELAND

THE KEYS TO THE COTTAGE: STORIES FROM THE WEST OF IRELAND

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9908193-1-8

Pub Date: Spring 2015

Pages: 126


By Carlos Reyes


In 1954, documentarian Dorothea Lange traveled to the West of Ireland to photograph that region’s stark, rural life. While the 20th century succeeded in modernizing much of the world, the people of western Ireland held fiercely to the past and their traditions. But beyond a world frozen in black and white photographs are the stories of those people. And in 1972, an Irish-American set out to find those stories in a county known as Clare.


Reyes—who grew up in a family of seasonal farm workers in western Oregon—was intent on discovering his ancestral roots. What he found in the West of Ireland was more than lineage. For a pittance Reyes purchased a 300-year-old stone cottage in Letterkelly and lived among the very farmers in Lange’s photographs. And over the course of more than forty years Reyes came to be welcomed by those people as one of their own.


Clustered behind the hedgerows of Letterkelly are the ruins of cottages abandoned during the Potato Famine of the 1800s, a daily reminder of the devastation that swept through the West of Ireland. The people in Reyes’ stories are the descendants of those either too poor to escape or tough enough to have survived The Great Hunger. With humor and the toughest of skin, they scrape out their existence: a cabbage patch and a bed of potatoes, a pig for meat, a few chickens, and a cow so they have milk for their tea.


The people Dorothea Lange captured in photographs are now gone. Reyes is the oldest surviving member of his adopted Irish family. Now 80, Reyes heeds the urgency to record the stories of County Clare and its remarkable people so that they come alive, to be treasured and remembered.


    Carlos Reyes has an almost Joycean ear for the nuances of Irish speech, and in The Keys To The Cottage he catches the energy and music of the talk and the crosstalk of a rural Ireland which scarcely exists any more. From his first bewildering encounters with people who see him as just another Yank, an outsider passing through, we watch him being enfolded into a culture and a family which he observes with a clear but loving eye. A rich and gentle humor suffuses this book, and as Ireland changes rapidly Reyes holds on to a vision of a slower time of hard farmwork, long sessions of poetry and pints, and endless cups of tea lubricating talk of politics and pigs. He gives us a host of characters, in that special Irish sense of the word which mixes personality with an engrossing crookedness of individuality. By the end, the outsider has become the genial chronicler of the kinds of lives that will not be seen again, and has become an insider more Irish than many of the Irish themselves.

    —Ger Killeen


    Carlos Reyes is a noted Portland poet, translator, and world traveler. His latest book of poetry is Pomegranate, Sister of the Heart (Lost Horse Press, 2013). The Book of Shadows: New and Selected Poems was published by Lost Horse Press in 2009. A Suitcase Full of Crows (1995) was a winner of the Bluestem Prize. His most recent book of translations is Poemas de amor y locura / Poems of Love and Madness: Selected Translations (Lynx House Press, 2013). In 2008 he was recipient of The Fortner Award from Saint Andrews College. He has been an Oregon Arts Commission Fellow, a Yaddo Fellow, a Fundación Valparaíso Fellow (Spain), a Heinrich Böll Fellow (Ireland), an Island Institute Fellow (Sitka, Alaska), as well as poet-in-resident at the Joshua Tree National Park, Acadia National Park, and most recently Devils Tower National Monument.

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