As Eoin McKiernan, President of the Irish American Cultural Institute, notes in his introduction, Peig has the “quality of honesty and sincerity, of life lived at the bone.” Long loved in Ireland, this autobiography will now be seen for what it truly is-one of the great heart-cries of the Irish people. Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. She is buried a short distance from the townland where she was born, above the sea on the Dingle Peninsula, within sight of the Great Blasket Island. 'Peig was the Netflix of the time,' says N Dhlaig, outlining a different side to Sayers' legacy, one of a full house where friends and neighbours would gather to be entertained. Peig was a Munster Irish speaking Seanchaí who lived in poverty, so she ticked every box basically. Also there was a trend in Ireland at the time to view poverty as genuine. laid out as expertly and as calmly as if twelve women had tended him.” Her own farewell to life had the same clear-eyed simplicity: “People will yet walk into the graveyard where I’ll be lying I’ll be stretched out quietly and the old world will have vanished.” An Ireland half-pagan, half-Christian, in which people like Peig rarely if ever left the place they were born, and in which the loss of children, to emigration or death, was a regular occurrence. Also, since people wanted 'real Irish', not anything corrupted by English, they wanted monoglot speakers, but also 'high Irish' so you needed a Seanchaí. Peig said of her son Tomás, who was killed in a fall from a clifftop: “Instead of his body being out in the broad ocean, there he was on the smooth detached stone. It reveals with fidelity, humor, and poignancy a woman’s life in a bleak world where survival itself was a triumph and death as familiar as life. Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. ![]() Here is one of the classics of modern Gaelic literature-the autobiography of Peig Sayers, a remarkable woman who lived forty years at the edge of survival on barren Great Blasket Island, and who came to be recognized as one of the last of Ireland’s traditional storytellers.
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