Aimsir

in the world cutting through your life, that life that lives in your belly, squishy and beating – the taste of being left behind, or of leaving something behind.

Afterword

by Seán Hewitt

It is the start of the new year in Dublin, and from my office window I can see flocks of geese, and the trees are beginning to outline themselves in red, the buds coming through. As is increasingly the case, the weather is milder than it should be: for the past few mornings, I have left the house with only a light jacket, and the succulent I keep on my windowsill has just begun to extend a long stem of flowers.

As a child, the seasons became a source of some anxiety for me, having picked up on discussions of climate change and environmental precarity. When October came, I would watch out for the leaves to turn, for the first frosts to set in, and only when I was convinced that autumn was with us in its proper form would I find myself able to settle. In the winter, snows became less frequent, and floods took their place. The cycle of the year was coming loose. Just as Clare Ní Lanagáin notices in “Broken Seasons Still Turn”, everything seemed ‘mild, elongated, unresolved’.

The poems, stories and images in this first issue of Aimsir are full of weather, full of the seasons, and remind me of that verbal echo in the Irish word, where time, weather, and the season are all held together. The close attachment that these artworks hold to the world has never been more necessary. They are each devotional, reminding me of Simone Weil’s idea that pure attention is a form of prayer.

What is evident, too, is that the disturbances of the seasons creates a disturbance in us: the weather is registered, unhoming our emotional weather, showing us to be the instinctive, feeling animals we are. There is, as Aisling Ní Choibheanaigh Nic Eoin writes in “Feabhra”, a meaning to winter, a meaning that might be lost if winter is lost.

It has given me much hope to read this first issue, feeling a close affiliation with its writers, artists and editors, and sensing through their close attention a renewed sense of the importance of marking the passing of time, of noticing the world around us, of documenting our interrelatedness: these are important acts in a precarious age, and though we do not know what the new seasons will bring, it gives me hope to know that they will be recorded, considered and given time in

Aimsir Notes

(i) The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal was a Scottish seasonal magazine published between Spring 1895 and Winter 1896/7. It was edited by Patrick Geddes and William Sharp (who also wrote under the pseudonym Fiona MacLeod), and published only four issues, one for each season. It is available to read online at https://1890s.ca/magazine_rack/

(ii) Written in the 1990s, and published posthumously, William M. Roth’s Birdsong is a meditation on the space between religion and myth in rural Ireland. Set in Tipperary, the novel follows the release of a woman from an institution and her life in the care of her complex family. It details her return to the company of birds, and her embodied understanding of birdsong. It is available to purchase from Coracle Press.

(iii) Description of Syncretism - Maggie O’Shea: This is a mixed media piece, utilising linocut printing layered upon intricate prints created using ink and red cabbage cross sections. Through exploring the traditions surrounding Imbolc, St. Brigid and the Celtic goddesses her character seems to emulate, I sought a way of combining natural materials with illustrations of Brigid’s interests. It seemed only apt that a triskelion would appear somewhere upon her person. In her hands she holds blackthorn sprigs; reminiscent of the phrase “spring sewing and blackthorn growing”, which was associated with the Imbolc period and accompanying increases in crop production and animal births. Brigid (and the goddess Danu, upon whom stories of Brigid appear to be based) was associated with a reconnection to nature, as well as wisdom, animals and healing. The fish at her feet is a wild Atlantic Irish salmon, an endangered species in Ireland as of 2022. Above that lies Irish kelp and a bird, images which combine both the natural elements and musicality of Irish tradition. The feathers around her head signify peace and tranquillity, as well as quills, representative of her association with poetry and literature.