Nick Laird

Are you now or have you ever been skilled with silkworm gut or boric lint? How intimate are you with breathing

through a Carbolic Chinese Twist? Using the four-hand lift or bamboo splints? Are you now or have you ever been

conversant, properly, with pain? Bandages, assorted. Tincture Eucalyptus. How intimate are you with breathing

through artificial respiration? There is...

In April 1959 Frank O’Connor wrote to his editor at the New Yorker to say that he had taken ‘the family up to Sligo to see how Yeats was getting on’. Since Yeats had been dead twenty years, he should have been getting on just fine. But:

Even he seemed to be disgruntled. Kavanagh the ex-poet ran into me soon after I came home, and the following conversation took place...

Growing up in Cookstown in County Tyrone, I would occasionally wonder what it would be like to be Martin McGuinness’s son. He was infamous for being Sinn Féin’s number two, and for being the officer commanding of the Derry brigade of the IRA, a position he assumed, as he recently admitted, in February 1972. He was born the same year as my mother, and my parents used to live...

doubt

Empty Laird was called that ‘cause his Christian name was Matthew and his middle one was Thomas.

Towards the end he commented that by his-self he’d made a sixth of the disciples, and forgone a life

on the quest for the rest. And a good book. Or a decent cause.

fear

Laird Jnr was a tyke, a terrier.

A nit-picker who grew to a hair-splitter, he was not so much...

And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?

Jonah 4.11

1

In A Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh (1854) Austin Henry Layard, the popular archaeologist and author, is again among the ruins by the dying of October,

scattering some Arabs from a...