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Master poet, storyteller and translator Ciaran Carson has great fun with this eighteenth-century erotic masterpiece, which deals with the topic of repression, sexual and otherwise. The Midnight Court has been called one of the greatest comic works of literature, and certainly the greatest comic poem ever written in Ireland. --Seán Ó TuamaThe story is an aisling--a Gaelic literary genre, in which a poet wanders and meets a beautiful fairy woman who is ultimately identified as Ireland herself, prophesying the return of her power--but this is an aisling stood on its head. As Carson explains: Merriman subverted all that. His fairy woman is not beautiful, but a threatening monster. The vision that she discloses is not of a future paradise, but a present reality ... The protagonists of the 'Court, ' including 'Merriman' himself, are ghosts, summoned into being by language; they are figments of the imagination. In the 'Court' the language itself is continually interrogated and Merriman is the great illusionist, continually spiriting words into another dimension. --Wake Forest University Press.