Table of Contents

11 Brendan
14 The Burning of the Book
15 The Boat
16 Brendan’s Meditation
17 The Crew
18 Shore Song
19 The Great Fish
22 The Mermayd
23 Thirsting Souls
24 The Coagulated Sea
26 The Cliff-top Monastery
27 Interlude
28 The Rock Saint
29 Hellmouth
32 The Siren
33 The Stolen Bridle
34 Devils’ Mountain
36 Respite
37 Brendan’s Vision
39 Many Fish
40 The Turf Rider
42 Judas
43 Burning Birds
44 Multum Bona Terra
47 The Walserands
48 The Sea Leaf
50 The Sea Serpent
52 A World Below
53 The New Book
54 Home
56 Burial

59 Notes
68 Select bibliography

Illustrations by Kathleen Neeley
13 St Brendan
21 Jasconius
31 Hellmouth
46 The Walserands
51 The Sea Serpent
57 Burial

About the Author

A.B. Jackson was born in Glasgow in 1965 and raised in the village of Bramhall, Cheshire. After moving to Cupar in Fife he studied English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His first book, Fire Stations (Anvil), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2003, and a limited edition pamphlet, Apocrypha (Donut Press), was published in 2011. In 2010 he won first prize in the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. His second collection, The Wilderness Party (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Voyage of St Brendanwas published by Bloodaxe Books in 2021.

Reviews

A swirl of animals and monsters and miraculous things, an amazing sea voyage in the way of Coleridge’s Rime and Melville’s Moby-Dick, A.B. Jackson’s imaging of Brendan’s founding myth is a modern fable of the patron saint of whales. Jackson’s exquisitely subtle, uproarious, comical and transcendent work is extraordinarily concise and beautiful. Its words relish and reinvent The Voyage of St Brendan as a Dark Age rollercoaster ride.
*Philip Hoare*

A.B. Jackson’s The Voyage of St Brendan is a feat of seriocomic storytelling. Informed by personal experience at sea in the far north, he uses Old Irish poetic forms while reflecting obliquely on polar exploration. Jackson’s Brendan is not cast in the lone explorer mould: when his brothers doubt, they share uncertainty, as a “composite fog-animal”. This book breaks happily with contemporary confessional trends, and invites us into its weird and gentle fictions. As the sailing saint himself calls out to Judas, “human flesh / deserves a break, some festive tenderness".
*Vahni Capildeo*

In revivifying one the most enduring stories of Western Europe, A.B. Jackson has nourished his imagination widely – medieval source texts, the literature of polar exploration, and his own encounters with the sea and with Brendan’s native landscape of West Kerry. Also, crucially, he has reconnected the tale, in its mix of narrative prose and syllabic verse, to its Old Irish roots in Immram Brain (The Voyage of Bran). Somewhat akin to Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Jackson’s inventive, stylish versions of these sea-wonders are deeply re-imagined in keeping with their traditional sources, while also offering the contemporary reader a beguiling and authentic exposure to the marvellous.
*Maurice Riordan*

Brendan’s fabulous adventures are told in prose of singing concision and quatrains both measured and elastic. Jackson’s ear is super-fine, accomplishing in words a series of special effects to match those of the big screen. His images gleam, his rhythms and rhymes (“giddy” and “glad eye” my favourite) are jouncing and ingenious, making each poem a pleasure to read and re-read.
*Vidyan Ravinthiran*

One of the medieval world’s richest legends has been given a remarkable treatment by A.B. Jackson. This is an excellent contribution to the considerable literature on St Brendan.
*Glyn S. Burgess*