Listen to the Land Speak: A Journey into the wisdom of what lies beneath us

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Pléann leabhar Mhanchán le aibhneacha, bailte, logainmeacha agus an cheangail atá idir béaloideas agus miotaseolaíocht na tíre seo. Much of Manchán Magan’s work is concerned with loss and the retention of precious remnants. In his Tamagotchi projects, Magan sought to preserve Irish words slipping from the lexicon. In 32 Words for Field (2020), which began as a cult hit, becoming one of the most talked-about Irish books in recent times, the focus was on the wealth of beauty within the Irish language and how it connects us to place, spirituality, nature and each other.

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Hear, O earth: behold, I will bring evil upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto my words, nor to my law, but rejected it. His latest book, Listen to the Land Speak, Manchán Magan takes a look at the Irish landscape and what it can tell us about who we are and were as a people. He says his childhood, some of which he spent in the West Kerry Gaeltacht, allowed him to meet with those who lived on the islands and witness their connection not only with the land but with the mythic elements of our culture. Besides containing a wealth of history and mythology – inextricably linked of course, this is Ireland after all – Magan has composed an antidote to the paralysing nihilism of the overwhelming climate crisis discourse. Throughout it all is an implicit call to action that could well be transformative. Una Mullally If you don't let it put you off and instead embrace it as a means for understanding the book will work as well for you as it did for me.Speaking about the last few years, Manchán said he enjoyed being in one place for a period of time and getting to know his environment in a more intimate way. Tá cónaí ar Mhanchán i gcontae na hIarmhí ar phaiste talún, áit a bhfuil crainn agus plandaí curtha aige le breis agus scór bliain. Manchán Magan has become a credit to the documentation of Irish life, history and literature over the years. Taking on the mantle of author, travel writer and documentary producer, he has left his mark as an Irishman in the wide world. Returning to issues of home, his works explore the complexity of Irish to English etymology in Thirty-Two Words for Field while his most recent success, Listen to the Land Speak: A Journey into the Wisdom of What Lies Lies Beneath Us opens up the chasm of largely forgotten Irish mythology and history to the masses. His work in this field has garnered him acclaim for feeding the inferno that burns behind the Irish person’s want for connection to their past. As one of the most highly anticipated titles from Gill Publishers in 2022, Listen to the Land Speak was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards 2022 for Non-Fiction and won the Waterstones Irish Book of the Year 2022, garnering much acclaim across the board. I thoroughly enjoyed Thirty-Two Words for Field, which is a fascinating glimpse into the ancient knowledge and forgotten connotations of a language intimately tied up with folklore, mythology, and pre-history. My biggest complaint about that book is that it is woefully short and touched only fleetingly on so many facts and topics that I hoped would be explored in more detail in Listen to the Land Speak. In this book, Magan appears to set out on a related exercise, which is to tie elements of the Irish landscape, rather than the Irish language, to ancient mythology, religion, custom, and life. This had the potential to be just as if not even more interesting than his first book, but unfortunately it falls flat. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) Sadly Magan, much moreso than in the previous book, far too often turns his attention away from deepening our understanding of Ireland's past and its traditions and towards making barbed polemical remarks. Over and over again he repeats strange laments for the loss of Pagan rituals in favour of Christianity (despite admitting, albeit hesitantly and begrudgingly, how plainly violent, unpleasant and superstitious many of them were). It's one thing to be saddened by the widespread ignorance of Ireland's pre-Christian history and folklore, and another thing to raise them up as the only valid element of Irish culture, and everything else as a foreign-born 'oppression' of some kind or another. Magan runs through the usual recycled finger-pointing at the British for everything wrong with Ireland and the Irish psyche today, and makes the usual errors of referring to pre-20th Century Ireland as 'colonised' and 'occupied,' neither of which is accurate no matter how badly brutalised the population was, nor how many of their old traditions lost. Having done this, he can then lazily borrow the tropes of 'postcolonial' literature and apply them clumsily to modern Ireland, no matter how much of a stretch this becomes. Every criticism rightly directed against successive Irish governments concerning the preservation of the nation's heritage is instead chalked up to the 'legacy of oppression,' whether religious, political, or cultural, and the inevitable effect that has on the blameless autonoma who are left behind once the evil colonial masters have left. This analysis is selectively applied, completely ignoring how Catholicism, supposedly the original 'oppressor,' was itself suppressed by the English for centuries. Magan fails to say anything original in this regard beyond slapping postmodernist and feminist ideas on the ancient past, as if our distant ancestors were just modern people with simpler technology and strange clothes.

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In this illuminating new book, Manchan Magan sets out on a journey, through bogs, across rivers and over mountains, to trace these ancestor's footsteps. He uncovers the ancient myths that have shaped our national identity and are embedded in the strata of land that have endured through millennia - from ice ages through to famines and floods.