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February-March 2026 65

onegal-born writer and editor

Pamela Mary Brown, whose

work centres on real life and

marginalised voices, brings

that ethos to ‘The Living

Skeleton: Irish Famine Poems’, gathering

79 contemporary poets as witnesses to the

great hunger. Her professional background

as a creative-writing educator and Writer-

in-Residence at HMP Magilligan shapes

her editorial method: she gravitates toward

testimony, memory and the raw material

of survival rather than academic distance.

That instinct informs the construction of this

anthology, which positions poetry as the

most immediate form of historical record

during the Famine years.

Pamela Mary Brown’s poets, songsters and

reciters appear here as witness-testimonies.

The anthology evokes the horrors of tragedy,

survival and exile while foregrounding poets

who wrote in real time during An Gorta Mór.

Their involuntary “movement”, as Brown

frames it, helped spark the late-nineteenth-

century literary revival and contributed to the

formation of the vast global Irish diaspora in

North America, Australia and beyond. The

work also sits beside the National Famine

Commemoration Day, Lá Cuimhneacháin

Náisiúnta an Ghorta Mhóir, held annually

each May, which attempts to restore the lost

human scale of the calamity.

The poems in the anthology: song,

verse, lyric or ballad, anchor the narrative

in witnessed experience rather than

in retrospective academic

reconstruction. Brown’s argument

is that the poets of the 1840s

recorded what they saw with

a ﬁdelity and vehemence that

policy documents and ocial reports could

never match. Her method echoes Thomas

Davis’s conviction that music is the Irish

people’s ﬁrst artistic faculty, and George

Nugent Reynolds’s observation that “and

thy harp-striking bards sing aloud with

emotion”. Poetry, for Brown, is not ornament

but evidence.

Her title is drawn from Michael Hogan’s

poem ‘The Living Skeleton — A Vision of

the Famine Year, 1847’, which delivers vivid

atmospheric detail and a sense of historical

immediacy:

Twas in ruthless Forty-Seven —

When the plague-fraught air was riven

With the sound which harrowed heaven,

Of a famished peoples cry—

When the famine ﬁend was formed,

All our godless rulers, charmed,

Saw their Irish victims die.

Hogan was not only a chronicler but a

literary experimenter. He also parodied

Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’, published in

1845, mimicking its rhythm and diction in

lines such as “Like a March night dim, and

dimmer,/Or a wintry moonbeam’s shimmer,/

Through a crevice in a tomb—/Glinted on

this realm of terror—this dreary land of

dole”. Familiarity with ‘The Raven’ makes the

imitation unmistakable. Hogan’s instinct to

draw on and adapt a major American poem

so soon after its publication underscores the

lively crosscurrents of the period: Irish writers

were not isolated, but engaged, ambitious,

and responding to global literary movements

even while famine raged around them.

Reynolds (1768–1802), though earlier,

sits naturally among the balladeers and

lyricists included by Brown. His ‘The Exile

of Erin’ foreshadows the Famine decades

before it occurred, expressing the emotional

architecture — dispossession, longing,

injustice — that would soon deﬁne the

national psyche.

Joyce later parodied Reynolds in

‘Finnegans Wake’ with the gleefully

distorted line “blighted troth be all bereft”.

In ‘Ulysses’, the Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s

pub laments “those driven out of house

and home in the black 47”, capturing the

continuing emotional charge of the Famine in

the early twentieth century. Joyce also cites

several poets included in Brown’s anthology:

Kickham, Moore, John Keegan Casey, John

Boyle O’Reilly and Jane Elgee ‘Speranza’

Wilde, whose ballads ‘The Exodus’ and

‘The Famine Year’ remain among the most

searing poetic responses to the catastrophe.

Her son Oscar Wilde’s sonnet ‘E Tenebris’,

written later, contains the stark image:

Pamela Mary Brown resurrects

79 Famine-era poets whose

verses record starvation, eviction

and survival with a clarity

government papers never dared

Kevin Kiely reviews ‘The Living Skeleton: Irish Famine Poems’, edited by Pamela

Mary Brown with an Introduction by Dr Kevin Kiely (Spa Cottage Publishing, 2025)

Skeletons alive:

poetic correction of

the Famine narrative

CULTURE

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66 February-March 2026

February-March 2026 PB

“The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,/My

heart is as some famine-murdered land”.

This intergenerational continuity reinforces

Brown’s underlying point: the Famine’s

literary aftermath was not conﬁned to the

1840s but extended deep into the national

imagination.

‘The Living Skeleton: Irish Famine Poems’

also challenges the revisionist narratives

advanced by FSL Lyons, Roy Foster, Robin

Haines and Maurice Craig, all of whom

sought to frame the Famine within the limits

of economic theory, administrative debate

or dispassionate historiography. Brown’s

anthology asserts a counter-case: that poetry

constituted a contemporaneous moral record,

one that exposes the emotional and physical

devastation in ways ocial documentation

cannot. In her reading, the poets stand as a

corrective, not as supplementary material.

Her selection stretches from Ethna

Carberry and Samuel Ferguson to Alfred

Perceval Graves, Emily Lawless, Mangan,

Rosa Mulholland and Dora Sigerson Shorter.

It spans late-eighteenth-century voices and

those born in the aftermath of the 1840s,

giving the anthology a wide temporal frame

but a coherent emotional register.

The work is not retrospective; it is

immediate. Keegan Casey’s ‘Charley Mr

O’Donahue’ oers a stark account of eviction:

“Where is the white house on the hill?/’T

was levelled to the ground/By evil law and

ruthless hands,/And bayonets ﬂashing

round…”.

Such lines function as reportage. Casey

later re-emerged through Augusta Gregory,

who used his ballad ‘The Rising of the Moon’

(1907) as the title for her nationalist play.

Fanny Parnell, sister of Charles Stewart

Parnell, also appears as a passionately

political voice. Her ‘What Shall We Weep For?’

turns Queen Victoria into an apocalyptic

emblem: “For the Scarlet Woman that’s

drunken with the blood and tears of her

slaves”. The technical craft may be uneven

but the emotional intensity is not.

Brown also attends to the oral

transmission of Famine memory. She notes

that grandparents passed down stories

heard in childhood, preserving visceral

accounts long before state curricula or

academic monographs existed. This living

memory formed a collective consciousness

that helped re-energise Irish cultural identity.

Brown herself shares geographic roots

with Frances Elizabeth Browne of Donegal,

one of the poets included, linking editor

and subject through location and inherited

experience.

The anthology embraces Emily Henrietta

Hickey’s ‘The Ballad of Lady Ellen’, which

addresses souperism; Aubrey de Vere’s

‘Year of Sorrow—Ireland—1849’, with its

admonition “Behold, O People! thou shalt

die!”; Ethna Carbery’s ‘The Passing of

the Gael’ alongside ‘Mo Chraoibhín Cno’;

Thomas D’Arcy McGee’s accusatory ‘The

Famine in the Land’ and the more furious

‘A Malediction’; and William Drennan’s

lament ‘The Wake of William Orr’, with its cry:

“Epochs marked by blood and tears!”. These

works map a poetic geography of suering,

protest, exile and political analysis.

Brown is sceptical of historians who dwell

on administrative debates involving Robert

Peel, John Russell, George Grey and William

à Court. Their correspondence, statistics

and policy memoranda fall short of what

poets captured in the moment. She focuses

instead on Charles Trevelyan, the Treasury

ocial whose attitudes and decisions

remain central to Famine historiography.

Trevelyan’s voice echoes through Pete St

John’s modern ballad ‘The Fields of Athenry’.

His Morning Chronicle writings and his book

‘The Irish Crisis’ characterised the Famine

as “sent by providence”. His tour of Ireland

left him appalled: he complained that “the

Natives” were excitable, that priests lent

repeal a religious aura and that peasants

laboured under “the delusion that they are

a nation”. His paranoia, expressed in the

warning that if the Irish rose “my life would

not be worth a bad pound note”, reveals the

anxiety beneath ocial policy.

Tim Pat Coogan’s ‘The Famine Plot:

England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest

Tragedy’ serves up demographic precision:

a population of over eight million falling

to roughly half between 1841 and 1851.

The Times editorial of 22 September 1846

applauded Poor Law relief and called the

blight a “blessing”. Coogan counters that

Ireland had plenty of food; people simply

lacked the money to buy it. James Donnelly

argued that banning oat exports would

have averted the catastrophe entirely. The

indictment is clear: the Famine was not only

natural but political.

Westminster’s prejudices long predated

1847. Benjamin Disraeli declared the Irish

“wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and

superstitious”. Parliament debated the Corn

Laws while Ireland starved. Yet Trevelyan was

knighted in 1848 for his famine-relief work.

Echoing this, Bob Geldof was knighted in

1986 for Live Aid, an event he later linked

explicitly to the memory of Skibbereen and

the Irish Famine. The continuity lies in the

role of song: Live Aid’s anthems carried

emotional weight just as the Famine ballads

once did. Trevelyan was unnerved by the

communal power of Irish music, which he

regarded as a threat because it fostered

solidarity.

Satire also ﬂourished. Edward Forbes

lampooned ocialdom in ‘The Potato

Commission’, mocking bureaucratic jargon

and pseudo-scientiﬁc authority: “As for

Solanum Tuberosum,/It’s a very bad job

for them as grows ’em”. Brown includes

such pieces to show the breadth of poetic

response: lyric, lament, protest, and ridicule.

Brown values content over polish. The

work of her 79 contributors, along with

anonymous ballads and broadsides, forms

a distinct Famine-genre: stark, emotionally

charged, realistic and lyrical. ‘The Living

Skeleton: Irish Famine Poems’ resonates

with what she calls “voices of the voiceless”,

oering unﬁltered expression from before,

during and after the catastrophe. The result is

a mosaic of poetic testimony that challenges

ocial narratives and reasserts the authority

of the people’s experience.

Kevin Kiely has a PhD in the Patronage of

Modernist Poetry. His recent publications

include ‘The Principles of Poetry DI + ID = Ψ

Psi’ (Spa Cottage Publishing).

‘The Living

Skeleton: Irish

Famine Poems’

features poets as

a corrective, not

as supplementary

material

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