Abstract: Exploiting the traditional association of rhetoric and architecture, this chapter argues that a different kind of writing (the silva) might express a different kind of dwelling place. A literary term for miscellany, silva also means wood, and the concrete context of the essay is the colonial fate of the Irish whose territorial and cultural subjugation was linked to the destruction of the woods said to define their cultural identity. A recent residency in Galway weighed these mythopoetic identifications against overwhelming evidence of environme...
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