President Michael D Higgins has announced plans to release a new spoken word album.
The album, 'Against All Certainty', is a new spoken word record of all President Higgins' poems set to music, which were recorded in Áras an Uachtaráin. It will consist of 10 tracks overall, arriving via folk and trad record label, Claddagh on September 5.
It was confirmed that a series of videos will also be released as part of the project, which among other things, will depict the "hardship of the president's" early years. Producers have said that listeners can expect to "find themselves fully transposed into the incredibly interesting life and times of the poet before he became Ireland's President, from childhood to adulthood".
"These are truly prodigious poems by Michael D Higgins - not just a milestone in his own work but in Irish poetry", Sebastian Barry, novelist and Laureate of Irish Fiction said on this spoken word album. "Readers and listeners will be astonished by their inspired truthfulness and their lovely adroitness of line. `…a new fire And a new day.’ Because the poet happens to be President of Ireland should not distract from the fact that these poems are written with all the precision and fervour of a free soul, and one that has made no bargain with rectitude or even the meaner sorts of discretion".
He continued: "They are not really truthful poems, but cooly so, and sometimes properly disquieting. There is something of the rejection of evasion in, say, the work of Paul Celan here, and what Matthew Arnold might have termed the 'dreadful authority’ of remembrance without window-dressing".
"Just the bare window both to look out of and look into. It feels like a signal achievement, and despite the mere chronology of the poet’s life, not at all in the nature of a swansong - in fact, the poems have the unquantifiable strength of youth".
"Like all tremendous poems they are being said for the first and the last time. They have appeared out of that ‘nowhere,’ that elusive ‘thin air,’ that all poets long to connect to. What a miracle".
