Shroud (dream‐piece, 16.viii.18) lasts about 12 minutes. During the summer of 2018 my late-wife, Susan McNally, was in the grip of an incurable cancer and on the morning of 16th August I woke up with the very distinct sense of having just heard music. This ‘dream-piece’ is my attempt to recall that music and the sense of death‐in‐life that haunted those days.
Shroud was premiered by Elizabeth Hilliard in the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, on 18th September 2022.
The text is based on Richard McKane’s translation of the first stanza of Anna Akhmatova’s poem ‘Death’ (1942) from his edition of her Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1989) and is used with the permission of the publishers:
I was on the edge of something,
to which I cannot hang a name.
This half-sleep calling,
this slipping away from myself.