Aosdána expresses great loss at the passing of poet and former member Máire Mhac an tSaoi

The poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi photographed near her home in Howth, Co Dublin. Photograph Frank Miller / The Irish Times

Aosdána expresses great loss at the passing of poet and former member Máire Mhac an tSaoi. A tribute from fellow Aosdána member and poet, Thomas Mc Carthy.

“What a poet was Mhac an tSaoi, brave, scholarly, passionate, loyal, uncompromising. With her, poetry belonged to a moral universe, it was part of that immortal, necessary, vital grammar of humanistic thought. Each poem she wrote was as permanent as a stone monument, and as carefully planned and chiselled out of words and spirit. She couldn’t conceive of a poem that didn’t intend to be immortal and everything she wrote has the mark of her fastidious grandeur and national essence. She wrote the most dramatic poems about love, the possessive love of lovers, but also the most tender, yearning poems about motherhood and childhood. ‘Codhladh an Gaiscigh,’ ‘Cré na Mná Tí’ and ‘Ceathrúintí Mháire Ní Ogáin’ are works that have already attached themselves to the permanent fabric of Irish culture; they teach us what love is, what womanhood is, and what it means to have the energy to renew culture by simply being fully alive within it. She will be missed terribly, yet she will live forever.”

Thomas Mc Carthy