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An initiative of the Institute for Conflict Resolution as part of the Peace IV Programme 2019, Art at the Heart of the Peninsula was designed to raise awareness of the history, migration and diversity of those people who have come to and from the Ards Peninsula in County Down, Northern Ireland. ‘Affreca and the Rooks’ is part of a public art commission comprising six permanent stand-alone pieces of ceramic bench sculptures and bronze plaques by visual artists Eleanor Wheeler and Alan Cargo, and poetry and prose by Maureen Boyle, Jan Carson, Siobhán Campbell, Kathleen McCracken, Paul Maddern and Frank Ormsby. The benches and the plaques featuring the writings are situated at locations throughout the Ards Peninsula - Donaghadee, Millisle, Ballywalter, Portaferry, Kircubbin and Greyabbey. Visitors to the sites can listen to recordings of the writers reading their work against soundscapes created by soundscape artists Mike Whan and Georgios Varoutsos.
Affreca and the Rooks
In a thicket of question marks, where can a noblewoman turn to speak?
When you prayed for landfall and unwrecked
the ship streamed into salvation, through the storm’s teeth
whose voice did you hear incanting – Mainistir Liath, Mainistir Liath?
Did you promise Grey Abbey to God, a gesture of thanksgiving
or take the chance to stake a place of your own, bolt-hole half way between
Dundrum and Carrickfergus, one castellated stronghold and the next?
Affreca – Gaelic, Saxon, Scottish. Affreca – small hill of reproach.
Godred’s daughter, de Courcy’s wife. What did the locals, the blow-ins
the holy men make of your outlandish name?
What did it mean to marry a Norman knight, maverick mercenary, the Earl of Ulster
who ate and slept in his armour, the most devout
warrior in Christendom? What price to you his kingdoms?
Where was he warring while you praised the yew trees and welcomed
the white monks from Cumberland
all that singing, all that silence?
When they raised the crossing tower, paved the cloisters
appointed the chancel’s lancet windows
did you fear erasure?
Restless on moon nights did your green skirt’s hemline
dust and polish the garden’s limit, gathering the medicinal
signatures of pennyroyal, feverfew, foxglove?
What disturbance made you ask yourself whose idea were the rooks
their round the clock canticles cherishing oak groves
like you cherished saltmarsh, samphire, otters, egrets?
Did you write, plant, sketch, embroider alone or in company
saunter solo or flanked by greyhounds
a silver merle, a sable, a brindle blue?
What colour were your eyes when you scanned the lough
for your Viking father, your Irish mother, the brothers and sisters
you wouldn’t see again?
Was it your wish to be buried here, French barley in your left hand
rosemary in your right, a white shell under
your multi-lingual tongue
the rooks relentlessly questioning what the gods gave back to you?
In a thicket of question marks, where can a noblewoman turn to speak?
When you prayed for landfall and unwrecked
the ship streamed into salvation, through the storm’s teeth
whose voice did you hear incanting – Mainistir Liath, Mainistir Liath?
Did you promise Grey Abbey to God, a gesture of thanksgiving
or take the chance to stake a place of your own, bolt-hole half way between
Dundrum and Carrickfergus, one castellated stronghold and the next?
Affreca – Gaelic, Saxon, Scottish. Affreca – small hill of reproach.
Godred’s daughter, de Courcy’s wife. What did the locals, the blow-ins
the holy men make of your outlandish name?
What did it mean to marry a Norman knight, maverick mercenary, the Earl of Ulster
who ate and slept in his armour, the most devout
warrior in Christendom? What price to you his kingdoms?
Where was he warring while you praised the yew trees and welcomed
the white monks from Cumberland
all that singing, all that silence?
When they raised the crossing tower, paved the cloisters
appointed the chancel’s lancet windows
did you fear erasure?
Restless on moon nights did your green skirt’s hemline
dust and polish the garden’s limit, gathering the medicinal
signatures of pennyroyal, feverfew, foxglove?
What disturbance made you ask yourself whose idea were the rooks
their round the clock canticles cherishing oak groves
like you cherished saltmarsh, samphire, otters, egrets?
Did you write, plant, sketch, embroider alone or in company
saunter solo or flanked by greyhounds
a silver merle, a sable, a brindle blue?
What colour were your eyes when you scanned the lough
for your Viking father, your Irish mother, the brothers and sisters
you wouldn’t see again?
Was it your wish to be buried here, French barley in your left hand
rosemary in your right, a white shell under
your multi-lingual tongue
the rooks relentlessly questioning what the gods gave back to you?
Black, Minority, Ethnic & Cultural Awareness Programme Art Exhibition
The sequence of poems ‘High Plain of the Oaks’ was commissioned by the Institute for Conflict Resolution as part of the Black, Minority, Ethnic & Cultural Awareness Programme Art Exhibition. The exhibition was mounted at the R-Space Gallery in Lisburn, Northern Ireland in November 2019, and was a culmination of art work exploring history, identity and belonging in Lisburn and Castlereagh districts. It included screen prints and silk paintings by community groups created under the guidance of Rachel Millar, collage images by visual artist Lucy Turner, and photographs of the Tonagh Women’s Group by Mariusz Smiejek. Printed on linen, ‘High Plain of the Oaks’ provided links between the visual images, with elements of the poems positioned to ‘buckle’ pieces of the art together.
The Pineries, Hillsborough Castle
‘tasting…as if Wine, Rosewater and Sugar were mixed together’
John Parkinson, Royal Botanist to Charles I, Theatrum Botanicum, 1640
October’s moon is cinnamon.
Under it Wills Hill, 1st Marquess of Downshire
and his elaborate entourage
are drifting off
the dinner party’s over and the candles
that amazed the orangeries and river walks
have guttered to a wink.
Only the pineries are wakeful.
What are they whispering to one another –
those heated, glowing rows of Ananas Comosus
(Smooth Cayenne, Jamaica Queen, Black Prince)?
Neither pine nor apple
are they tickled by the mania, the Old World’s passion
for a fruit with character?
Are they sorrowing the colonial plantations
of Brazil and Paraguay, that archipelago of wounds
across the tropics?
Or are they thinking back
through trans-Atlantic crossings
to Surinam, to Guadeloupe Island
and further back again
to the Tupi saying nanas, nanas –
quiet people cultivating
the Orinoco basin’s fragrant fruit.
‘tasting…as if Wine, Rosewater and Sugar were mixed together’
John Parkinson, Royal Botanist to Charles I, Theatrum Botanicum, 1640
October’s moon is cinnamon.
Under it Wills Hill, 1st Marquess of Downshire
and his elaborate entourage
are drifting off
the dinner party’s over and the candles
that amazed the orangeries and river walks
have guttered to a wink.
Only the pineries are wakeful.
What are they whispering to one another –
those heated, glowing rows of Ananas Comosus
(Smooth Cayenne, Jamaica Queen, Black Prince)?
Neither pine nor apple
are they tickled by the mania, the Old World’s passion
for a fruit with character?
Are they sorrowing the colonial plantations
of Brazil and Paraguay, that archipelago of wounds
across the tropics?
Or are they thinking back
through trans-Atlantic crossings
to Surinam, to Guadeloupe Island
and further back again
to the Tupi saying nanas, nanas –
quiet people cultivating
the Orinoco basin’s fragrant fruit.
