It is, I suppose, in the spirit of recent talk about the border poll on Irish reunification that I have been thinking about Shepard’s play and its meaning for these deep times.

In the play, principal character Hobart Struther is a New York art dealer who made his money buying paintings cheap and flogging them at high prices. But Struther, played in the original showing by Stephen Rea, is a man at a crossroads.

He is a man lost who has come out west on a quest for authenticity. The death of his horse symbolises the ending of one way of life. Struther questions his life as he attempts to bury the dead animal.

In the great expanse of the American west – a border land in itself – he questions what has been done to that great land, which has already seen the closing of the frontier in 1890. He reflects on the killing of the native Americans and the damming of the rivers. Struther questions why, in his predicament, he is having trouble taming the wild when all of this has been done to the wild.

Shepard’s play is an examination of the American psyche and the notion of borderlands where old ghosts lurk.

In a week when both Bobby Sands’ death and the foundation of the Northern Irish state were remembered, this newspaper has focused on our own Border, its future and what a border poll might look like.

Shepard’s play about the quintessential American west could be about other places and other thresholds that contain so many memories.

When Hobart Struther asks what happened to him and this land, it’s important to remember that the play premiered in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 2007. Perhaps the staging of the play in a land with its own borders and frontiers spoke more than we can say about our own situation.

Struther’s character has lived long enough to see that the wildness of the land has been tamed through destruction.

Our frontier has known destruction and chaos and, thanks to the Good Friday Agreement, its liminal nature is now an invisible one. Reading the statistics, the dream of crossing over the final threshold remains divisive.

Reunification is something that a great deal of people in the Republic give serious thought to. However, this sentiment is not nearly as strong in the North.

One of the most striking aspects about the poll is the feeling that a united Ireland could jeoparadise peace on the island. As events in recent weeks in the North have shown, this is an island that still contains the old elements of violence.

Unlike Shepard’s west, our frontier, though invisible, is still alive. Shepard was no stranger to Ireland and came to this land many times to speak at various events. In casting Stephen Rea as the main character in Kicking a Dead Horse, perhaps he was acutely aware that Rea is a man from a transitional space.

Shepard’s work dealt with people on the fringes of society. They could be described as broken people who were attempting to make sense of their world.

In all of his works that I have read or seen, there is a sense of a landscape that has been tamed. In that taming, the magic of the place has been lost.

From Buried Child to Curse of the Starving Class, we meet characters who are tied to the land that has made them, but they have also broken from it.

Upon returning to Ireland several years ago, I began my theatrical education in the Abbey by seeing these plays and learning how best we can reflect our own situation.

I remember seeing Curse of the Starving Class, and the rumblings and gasps from the audience as the Tate family attempted to deal with the problems of banks and land and a broken family.

The Tates have a fatal problem: as Shepard puts it, nitroglycerine runs in their veins. In a way, I feel we can understand that notion very deeply. We too have liquid dynamite running in our collective veins.

Like the Tate family, it can appear in mad, bad and dangerous ways, as the violence of recent weeks has illustrated.

Perhaps the American frontier and the Irish one have more in common than we can know, or perhaps all border lands are like this and it is up to the poets to make sense of them.

In Kicking a Dead Horse, Shepard concurs that whatever the old west was, it is gone. Similarly, whatever the Border was, it too is gone and has been replaced with something else. What that will be in the future is still unknown.

As for my log-splitting wood pile, I will continue my work – picking, splitting and loading. I am carrying out the work in the hope that I will get to enjoy the winter fires it shall bring.

Unlike Hobart Struther, I am still full of dreams. Perhaps it is because youth is on my side and all the newness of the world has not been taken from me, but I cannot say for certain.

As I split the wood, I think of Sam Shepard and what he would make of the world we have now. He would, no doubt, have something to say that resonates beyond the American settings of his work – something that speaks of the thresholds we all must cross.