From the Back Cover

“Our country has been undone. The national purpose is in a heap of fragments. We are living at the heart of a national catastrophe: the result of one or two key miscalculations by a brilliantly educated but very ill Minister. If Ulster had been in charge, like the Great Earl of Kildare, decisions would have been different. I’m sure of this. Ulster would have been able to hold all of Ireland steady. The citizens of the Dáil are now the indentured servants of European capital. We must all work like dogs to pay for our passage through this great night of the Irish nationalist soul. Scholars worry. Theatre directors fret and form ‘citizen assemblies’. Poets worry. Yes, the poets of my generation really worry. Was it some single process of national thinking that brought this catastrophe to pass? Was it our careless way with words?”

from “The Years of Forgetting, 2006-11” by Thomas McCarthy