'We Were Happy Here' by John Ennis
We Were Happy Here is a heart-splitting, sky-ripping elegy rendered in the language of myth and memory. With devastating clarity and lyrical force, John Ennis resurrects the tragic deaths of Doris Hüttl and Ernst Renn on Achill Island in March 1976; not simply to mourn them, but to celebrate their love. This collection does not look away.
Ennis conjures the young couple’s final journey with a poet’s instinct for place and a mourner’s grip on time. The refrains “our green Toyota,” “Ais Léím,” “we were happy here”, become mantras echoing through the bogs and breakers of Achill. These are not just poems; they are unflinching vespers for love lost in the Mayo surf, for lives whose brightest hour became their last.
In form, the poems are, like the landscape, windswept. They are broken, breathless, open to the elements. There is little punctuation, few constraints, and absolutely no pretence in this collection. This is as it should be. The result is a poetic terrain that mirrors the island’s own: raw, beautifully rugged, sacred and unforgiving.
Ennis tends to employ repetition, fragmentation, and startling image-craft to beguile and draw us into a narrative that’s both mythic and terribly real, where bog cotton nods “for a reason,” daffodils dance in mortuaries, and a hosepipe becomes an instrument of finality.
This is a book unafraid to be vulnerable. Its metaphysical daring, at once spiritual and corporeal, asks: how do we mourn when the beloved is not only lost, but vanished together with their own future? How do we honour the desire that dares to defy illness, despair, and societal judgment?
To read this collection is to walk the last steps with Doris and Ernst. To feel, if only for a page, what it might mean to love. We Were Happy Here is an emotional reckoning. May it offer solace. May it offer remembrance.
Niall MacGiolla Bhuí, PhD. August 2025.
Bound for Achill
On a day of daffodils
on the highway west
cruising,
hand in hand
when it was safe
Doris & Ernst
their fair faces
blooming in the sunlight
in a green Toyota
Mein Irisch Kinder
Wo weilest du? –
Their fuel tank overflowing
to scale the mountains of Achill
last time till the end of the day
and they’d return this route
but not in the rented green Toyota
its front seats erect
Happiness
how do you milk the last hours of it
give it a dry strig
Yes, a fair noon for daffodils
dancing on the March highway
coming and going
Od’ und leer das Meer
At Heinrich Böll’s Cottage with its Rhododendrons and Fuchsias
Ernst at the wheel
of the green Toyota
all life in the rhododendron
buds opening and closing
so too these March days
not far now
our vertiginous fall to the
exhaust fogging our Toyota windows
in the Bay of Ash Léím
here we park like aliens
(which of you will taste our salt pools in your mouths?)
here where we are taboo
forever but not in the kindness of an Achill kitchen
a cup of tea and biscuits for the stranger blowing in,
Doris, your future bleak as Minaun
in the backyard of Heinrich Böll,
in these sparse acres of Achill Henge
thrown up in a weekend of cosmic laughter
towards the slip stream of the equinox:
Queen of the West look up at us
pray
a beach comber to look down find us
the morning after
the night before
with our arms in the scented fuchsia of each other
Not All the Holy Wells Burbling Pieties
on roof-blown mountains
can stop us
not all the whitest quartzite
alters our minds on our rocky plateau
in our bliss
it’s like that
for it takes raw courage to do what we are doing
Don Allum battling Atlantic combers
St. John’s to Dooagh
every inis of each other
within reach for a time
the clavicles of laughter
the time Doris you lose your shoeing in the gap of the wild horses
find us together
our front seats inclined
not for the first time
the kindness of locals
mirrored
in the bright discoloured faces
of the unthinkable
* All poems © to John Ennis. 'We Were Happy Here' by poet, John Ennis, is available to purchase on Amazon. Ennis is green lit by Amnesty International for his work.