A beautiful video which discusses Austin Clarke's overlooked narrative poem Mnemosyne Lay in Dust. Professor Ann Breen, of University College Cork describes how the poem, written in 1966 was an attempt by Clarke to capture the dramatic breakdown that Clarke suffered while a young man (he spent a year in St Patrick's mental hospital as a result).

As Breen describes it, the poem is an attempt to describe, from memory, the loss of memory. It's begining and end are reasonably conventional, but the mid section of the poem represents hallucination, dream, and paranoia, and as Breen points out, you're probably not supposed to understand directly.

A wonderful short film, directed by Stephen Bean, and produced by Breen.