The Haunted Bog: Spectrality and the Bog Poems

“Our world is interwoven”: Micheal O’Siadhail and The Five Quintets

“…59 ere can be no doubt that the spectral is always a part of the imaginative process and "holds a formative space within literature as we are given to reproducing spectres in the act of writing". 60 However, the public nature of this poem means that O'Siadhail is looking to test the validity of his own personal ghosts and see how familiar and compound they can become. I think most readers will have a familiarity with most of the people named, but depending on disciplinary knowledge and interests, by de nition, there will be names here that are unfamiliar, so poetry here, unusually, is o ering itself as a socially and culturally epistemic discourse that can tell us about areas of knowledge about which we have been hitherto ignorant.…”