Morning on Lough Eske, Donegal Mist enveloped hills: a collective shroud of the voices, long lost to a troubled, Irish past. An evocation of distant memories. For centuries, such vapours have steered countless pens of rising emerald stars into the literary firmament; their words percolating the heady mix of peat-smoked rooms, viewed through deep draughts of snow-capped raven-black, or the fiery fumes of malted amber. Khayyam’s long-risen hunter forms a pale ghost beyond the dull, dank, dripping sentinels on the lough’s unseen shore, boughs swaying with the haunting, faded strains of last evening’s beaten bodrán and frenzied fiddle. Omnipresent echoes of unrequited expectation. © Copyright 2008 Robert M Jaggs-Fowler