Winger Of The Blue: An Elegy for Joseph Campbell

‍" I am the mountainy singer,
The voice of the peasant's dream,
The cry of the wind on the wooded hill,
The leap of the fish in the stream."
- Joseph Campbell

The poet, scholar and patriot Joseph Campbell lived his later years in the Glencree Valley, dying in his beloved cottage at Lackendarragh in 1944. Perhaps best known for My Lagan Love, the beautiful song that celebrates his native Belfast, this outdoor performance remembers Campbell, the man whom Austin Clarke once called "one of the rarest Gaelic minds of our times."

A contemporary of Patrick Pearse and WB Yeats, Campbell was a complex man who wrote beautiful songs and poems and this Shaking Bog production will celebrate his somewhat forgotten legacy in both song and verse. In 1940, he wrote "My cabin lies at the bottom of the Glencree valley floor. It's a poor wild place, but the mountains around, and the bracken, and the liquid wailing note of the curlew are compensatory. I have painted up the interior of the shack - the outside is as Nature makes it.."  

WINGER OF THE BLUE: An Elegy for Joseph Campbell attempts to conjure up the spirit of Campbell and bring his memory back to life amidst the landscape that he loved so deeply.