Come Here To Me!

Goodbye Twilight: Songs of the Irish Struggle, compiled by Leslie H. Daiken, was a collection of (primarily) political poetry published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1936.  I was totally unaware of its existence until the historian David Convery, editor of Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working Class Life, posted an image of its striking cover, which I immediately recognised as the work of the great  Harry Kernoff.

Dedicated to Tom Mooney, a political radical then imprisoned in San Quentin Prison in San Francisco, the collection included contributions from Paddy Kavanagh, Liam MacGabhann and  Charlotte Despard.Some reviewers were less than kind to the work,  and the quality of the poetry within it is wildly uneven, but it does include a number of strong contributions, especially those dealing with the then on-going crisis in Spain and the rise of Fascism. The  dust-jacket notes that:

Here is the authentic voice of the people, peasants, workers and intellectuals, united in the common aim of the struggle for freedom; political and economic freedom.

Daiken used two great woodcuts in the work from Harry Kernoff (1900-1974).  Though born in London in 1900, Kernoff is now synonymous with Dublin, and many of his works depicted great scenes of  Dublin street life, from its tenements to its public houses. Unashamedly politically radical, some of his finest works depicted comrades and inspirations, such as IRA radical George Gilmore and the executed Marxist and Easter Rising leader James Connolly.

1936, the year Goodbye Twilight was published, was also the year Kernoff became a part of the Royal Hibernian Acadamy.  His two woodcuts in this work deserve to be seen, and having just got my hands on a copy of the book I could think of no better place for them than here:

Woodcut from Goodbye Twilight.

Woodcut from Goodbye Twilight.