An Gorta Mór: Doolough, Mayo, 1849

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"There are chapbooks, and there are chapbooks. And then there is Legion by Eleanor Hooker.

Letterset by hand, crafted in the old style, these 8 poems sing of honeybees and intone the "trembling water of the lake". Eleanor's work is evocative as always, teeming with the profusion of nature and its gifts and the people who interact with these, in good ways and bad. Echoes of Yeats's "bee-loud glade" come to mind, not just because of the theme but for the texture of the language too.

But Eleanor's words focus on the feminine, weaving images like spells cast over the page, words to harness the energy of the natural world that most of us don't understand but that lead the poet "to wheedle with words".

The honeybee with all its associations - productivity, sweet honey, its sting, the drone reproducing only to die - is a charming metaphor for the many dichotomies of life as well as the greed that abounds in society, where the bee-elect is "trapped in the syrup of its own success".

A beautiful artefact made by Hans van Eijk of Bonnefant Press, Maastricht, Holland, with frontispiece by Jeanie Tomanek."

Anamaría Crowe Serrano - poet and author

"There are chapbooks, and there are chapbooks. And then there is Legion by Eleanor Hooker.

A beautiful artefact made by Hans van Eijk of Bonnefant Press, Maastricht, Holland, with frontispiece by Jeanie Tomanek."

Anamaría Crowe Serrano - poet and author

Eleanor Hooker
Jul 14
1 min read

My thanks to Alan Hayes and Nuala O'Connor, editors of Washing Windows V: Women Revolutionise Irish Poetry, 1975 - 2025 for including my poem 'An Gorta Mòr: Doolough, Mayo, 1849' in the latest and final anthology of Washing Windows. My poem on The Doolough Tragedy, relatesd an event that took place during the Irish Famine (An Gorta Mór - the great hunger) close to Doo Lough in southwest County Mayo, when starving and ill, the poor were forced on a gruelling death march of 12miles in appalling winter weather, only to be denied alms. Many perished on the journey home. Read More

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