Mairéad Byrne tour de force reading "Gan in The Midnight Court"

Poet Mairéad Byrne reading on the opening night of the Policromia Festival in Siena in May 2026 with this stunning reading from her "Gan in The Midnight Court". She is a co-founder of this intimate and internationalist festival around poets and translation exchanges notably between English-Italian.

This is what she writes about her piece:

“There's a lot that can be said about gan but at the moment I'll only say that I see lack, want, anger/ache crowding into the space made by absence and making a threnodic undersong to Brian Merriman’s late 18th-century 1,026-line Gaelic poem Cúirt an Mheán-Oíche (The Midnight Court), a paradoxical work. 

Gan is the third most frequent word used in Cúirt an Mheán-Oíche, after is (the verb to be) and an (the definite article). It is used by all characters and makes a commonality between the principal adversaries of the court. It means without but doesn’t sound like that word. It sounds more like gone.

The astonishing frequency of this tiny potent word, which hammers down relentlessly in bursts or faltering heartbeat throughout, reminds us powerfully of the oral and performance commitments of Cúirt an Mheán-Oíche.

In print it is a kind of stealth weapon, a web of fractures beneath the lively surface of the poem. Compounding its effacement, a slight distaste for repetition in English language poetry causes it to be winnowed into variants.

If I were translating Cúirt an Mheán-Oíche into English (which I am), I wouldn’t attempt to translate this word. By culling all the incidences of gan in the poem and delivering them here, with gobbets of what is lacking or absent attached to them, I foreground an overlooked element of the connective tissue of this poem.” (Note: first published in StoKE 11 (2025).

Many thanks to Mairéad for providing this wonderful material for use here

Policromia info can be found here: