Bedtime Stories for the End of the World asked some of the UK’s top poets, including Olga Dermott-Bond, to ‘re-imagine their favourite myths, fairytales and legends’. The sequence that Olga wrote features in her Against the Grain pamphlet, apple, fallen and you can hear her reading from the sequence here.
Some background from Olga’s pamphlet –
“In the traditional telling of the Irish Myth, Fionn Mac cum Haill, the Irish Giant picks a fight with a Scottish giant, who is stronger and greater than he is. His wife, Oonagh, dresses her husband up as a baby and puts him in a cot. When the Scottish Giant comes to fight, Oonagh tells him her husband is not there and serves him great rocks to eat from the garden. The Scottish giant, intimidated by the supposed might of Fionn, flees, ripping up the path between Ireland and Scotland, leaving the Giant’s Causeway in his wake.”
The first poem from the sequence –