6: BSW1 Condy in the Bluestacks

Speaker: Francis HarveyFrom the Bluestack Way - Part 1 playlist. Francis Harvey (1925-2014) was originally from Enniskillen, but lived near Donegal Town for years. As he said himself ‘I owe an awful lot to the county of Donegal. In fact, I think I might never have become a poet if it wasn’t for the landscape of Donegal.’ Among Francis Harvey’s great poems is the one about Condy the sheepman, almost a mythic figure but rooted in the landscape of the Blue Stack Mountains. Written over forty years ago, the Donegal Democrat believes that 'it encapsulates the struggle between ‘progress’ and stasis, between an old man’s dignity and the encroachment of modernity'.  We were delighted to have the poet recite Condy for us in the audio piece and have to thank him and his daughter Esther for making it happen.  Condy  He lives alone in the shadow of mountains; his tilted stony acres fray the clouds; he takes eight years out of a dog and knows his ewes better than the sons he never had. The horizon is his fence, his sheep range free, and yet his mind is penned, his spirit tethered. He climbs through darkness into the light on the summit but hears no voice from a cloud. He fears death – the rickle of bleached bones in lonely places and in drink weeps for himself and his brothers and for the others on whom the shadow of mountains fell.