In 2020, as the world turned inward, Liam O'Maonlaí and Torrin Ryan entered the studio with Martin Butler to record material drawn from one of Ireland's deepest wells: the tradition of poems and songs born from woodlands, fields, and the natural world. The result was Poems and Songs from the Woodlands Edge, a project that anchors itself in a piece as enduring and rooted as any in the Irish literary canon: "An Bonnán Buí"—The Yellow Bittern, a traditional poem that has traveled through centuries and countless voices.
"An Bonnán Buí" is one of Ireland's most resonant works of folk poetry. The title itself—"The Yellow Bittern"—points toward something essential in the Irish artistic sensibility: the ability to find profound meaning in the natural world, to let a single bird carry the weight of human emotion, loss, and cultural identity. The poem exists in multiple versions across Irish tradition, passed from voice to voice, generation to generation. Each iteration carries the stamp of its moment and its singer.
When such a work enters the hands of contemporary musicians, the question becomes not whether to record it, but how to honor it—how to let it speak to listeners in a new era without erasing the authority of its lineage. The collaboration between O'Maonlaí and Ryan, with Martin Butler's involvement in the production and composition, represents one answer to that question: bring it forward as living song, not museum artifact.
The album's very title—Poems and Songs from the Woodlands Edge—suggests a deliberate stance. The "woodlands edge" is a liminal space, a threshold between cultivated and wild. In 2020 especially, as the pandemic forced many to reckon with isolation, proximity to nature, and the fragility of gathered community, returning to poetry born from that threshold carried particular resonance. Traditional Irish verse, rooted in landscape and feeling, offered something that contemporary songwriting often cannot: the accumulated emotional intelligence of centuries of voices working the same emotional terrain.
This is not nostalgia. It is recognition. When artists like O'Maonlaí choose to enter dialogue with traditional material, they are participating in an unbroken chain of transmission. Folk music does not exist in a museum. It lives in reinterpretation, in the voice of each new generation of singers willing to carry it forward.
The featured collaboration between O'Maonlaí and Torrin Ryan creates a dialogical space. Two voices approaching the same poem create possibility: contrast, harmony, a sense of conversation across time. The involvement of Martin Butler—whether as composer, arranger, or co-creator—adds another layer of contemporary craft to material that might otherwise risk feeling purely archival. The album's five-minute rendering of "An Bonnán Buí" (released May 3, 2020, with the video arriving two weeks later) suggests a considered arrangement, something neither rushed nor overly elaborate.
This matters because it honors both the source material and the listener. Traditional Irish poetry demands vocal presence. The words themselves carry music, rhythm, and linguistic music. When singers of skill and sensitivity approach such work, they are not adding something absent—they are revealing what the poem itself already contains.
For those drawn to this recording, the path forward leads in several directions. Seeking out other recordings and versions of "An Bonnán Buí" reveals how each era and singer reshapes the work—a living history lesson in tradition itself. Exploring the broader work of Liam O'Maonlaí and Torrin Ryan independently provides context for how their separate artistic practices informed this collaboration. Reading the poem itself, in Irish and in translation, offers access to dimensions no recording, however skilled, can fully contain. And considering other projects in the lineage of Poems and Songs from the Woodlands Edge—contemporary musicians working deliberately with folk traditions—reveals how vital this conversation between past and present has become.
