Word: irelands
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ALTHOUGH WILLIAM TREVOR now lives in the South-West of England, he was born and raised an Irishman. His novels and short stories are infused with a powerful concern and sympathy for the landscape and people of Ireland--especially for its writers. Who better than Trevor, then, to guide us on a tour of Irish writers and their evocations of landscape? It is a tour which takes the reader from the earliest murmurs of monks and gypsies (anonymous stories told long before the introduction of the English to Ireland) to the contemporary voices of young Irish and Northern Irish poets...
...much later, in the nineteenth century, when the English had for centuries been shaping Ireland's history, the visitors sent home many reports. Their comments surfaced both in English guidebooks such as "Ireland: it's scenery, character, etc," and in the writings of Scott and Thackeray. Thackeray wrote, "Directly you see it, it smiles at you as innocent and friendly as a little child...
Trevor tends to connect his chosen selection of writings with rather dry, cursory remarks. But in more extended passages, such as the fascinating and powerfully-felt paragraph comparing the literary aspects of England and Ireland in the nineteenth century, Trevor's voice takes on the tone of a refreshingly enthusiastic, rather than a dutiful, guide. For example, talking about the playwright Sean O'Casey, Trevor says that...
...spite of the recurring accent on solitariness that echoes through Irish literature, you can never count on being entirely alone in Ireland's empty places. And beneath those peeled-off surfaces nothing is quite what you might expect...
...simple. Says he: "There is a job to be done-to record the truth. And I have a terrific personal compulsion to do it." In the past three years, that impulse has repeatedly taken Nachtwey into some of the main cockpits of violence: Central America, the Middle East, Northern Ireland. Last year, on assignment for TIME, he spent nearly six months in Central America, mostly in Nicaragua; he was in Lebanon for much of the rest of the year. Since then, he has taken his cameras back to Central America. Last month he was with Nicaraguan contra guerrillas who fought...