Word: irishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This book is not an academic investigation of either Irish literature or the inspiration of landscape. It is a writer's journey, a tour of places which other writers have felt affection for also, or have known excitement or alarm...
...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. Accompanying the text is a generous assortment...
...ruined abbey of Corcomroe in County Clare and, later, the forbidding Norman tower in Galway: "An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower" which Yeats made his summer house. And in "Reveries over Childhood and Youth." Yeats reminisces about Lissadell House, the home of a favourite Anglo-Irish family...
...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...
...rare in Trevor's text. The author's personal stamp is too little evident in this tour, he defers, rather, to the role of editor and prompter. It is, in a sense, too thorough a tour--one which takes us into too many obscure nooks and crannies of the Irish literary landscape. And too often these unremarkable "bits and pieces" detract from the more important voices--limiting our visit to Swift, for example, to a few rather trivial verses in praise of gardens. The result, then, of this compilation is a thinly disguised anthology. It includes, for the sake...