Ballads of a Bogman (2022)

In this peripatetic age, when, by necessity or will, so many of us leave the place in which we are raised to create new lives and put down new roots elsewhere, the question of where home is can become a vexed one. The two works in this recital explore that question of home and belonging, and of exile from wherever that home might be.

In 2021, an initiative by Ireland’s Contemporary Music Centre to encourage creative collaboration between musical colleagues brought together tenor Gavan Ring and pianist Louise Thomas with composer Stephen McNeff. For their collaboration, Gavan suggested that McNeff might wish to look at the poetry of Sigerson Clifford who, like Gavan, was raised in the town of Cahersiveen on the Iveragh peninsula of County Kerry, on Ireland’s southwest coast. McNeff found himself ‘instantly bowled over’ by Clifford’s poems, which ‘possessed a clear voice and a technical mastery that made them perfect’ for ‘operatic songs’.

Clifford was a writer of plays, poetry and prose whose most successful work was his 1955 poetry collection Ballads of a Bogman. Although his work in the civil service took him to Dublin from 1943, his writings remained focussed on Cahersiveen, situated on the hills below upland peat bogs and above ocean inlets, and its people.

There is some kinship with AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad in the balladry of Clifford’s poems, in their evocations of place, and their talk of friendship, tinged with the untimely loss of youth in war. In them we also find a conflict between the yearning to set foot upon the open road or sea and the need and thirst for home; the romance of freedom in your homeland – exemplified in Clifford’s writing in talk of Ireland’s travelling community and the Tinkerman – versus the likely reality of being stuck in an office far away as you try to earn a living. The deep roots of connection to that place, and the sense of local inheritance, are affirmed in Clifford’s digging deep into Ireland’s rich poetical heritage: we hear a version of Antoine Ó Raifteirí’s ‘Cill Aodáin’ (The County Mayo), and touch upon tropes from Ireland’s most celebrated poet WB Yeats, including invocations of that country’s great stories of legend, with mention of Dierdre, Diarmuid, Finn and others. In all of this there is the life-long quest for identity: who we are, and what it is that makes up our being.

Gavan Ring writes of McNeff’s Ballads of a Bogman, ‘The wonderful thing about this song cycle is that it captures Sigerson Clifford’s already exceptional poetry to the degree that you really feel the spirit and soul of South Kerry and Cahersiveen’.

© Philip Lancaster 2026