Irish Books

The Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism of Samuel Beckett: Volume IV of The Grove Centenary Editions

Samuel Beckett

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Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( B ) -> Beckett, Samuel
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Authors, A-Z -> ( C ) -> Coetzee, J.M.

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Edited by Paul Auster, this four–volume hardcover set of Beckett's canon has been designed by award-winner Laura Lindgren. Available individually, as well as in a boxed set, these books are specially bound with covers featuring images central to Beckett's works. Typographical errors that remained uncorrected in the various prior editions have now been corrected in consultation with Beckett scholars C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski.

"[Beckett] settled on philosophical comedy as the medium for his uniquely anguished, arrogant, self-doubting, scrupulous temperament. In the popular mind his name is associated with the mysterious Godot who may or may not come but for whom we wait anyhow. In this he seemed to define the mood of an age. But his range is wider than that, and his achievement far greater. Beckett was an artist possessed by a vision of life without consolation or dignity or promise of grace, in the face of which our only duty is not to lie to ourselves. It was a vision to which he gave expression in language of a virile strength and intellectual subtlety that marks him as one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century." — J. M. Coetzee, from his Introduction

Modern Irish Poetry: An Anthology

Patrick Crotty

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A near-model anthology 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

I use this book, together with Paul Muldoon's Contemporary Irish Poetry and Fallon/Mahon's Contemporary Irish Poetry as texts for Adult Education.Crotty's book has 47 poets and gives a short insightful introduction to every poet. It is a wide-ranging book, including 3 modernist poets, 5 poets who write in Irish--for which there are sensitive translations by Crotty himself as well as Muldoon and Heaney. Most space is given to Muldoon, Heaney, Kavanagh, MacNeice, Kinsella, Durcan, Clarke, O Riordáin, and Ní Dhomhnaill in that order. The poems are generally well chosen. Ciaran Carson is represented, and the other fine young poet in Irish Cathal O Searcaigh. There is the good humor of Durcan, Duhig and McDonald. My students feel warmly about the book, and are writing surprisingly good poems of their own as response to it.

Editorial Review:

A major collection of 20th century Irish poetry representing 47 poets since Yeats.

Yeats (A Galaxy Book 378)

Harold Bloom

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> People, A-Z -> ( Y ) -> Yeats, William Butler
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Criticism & Theory -> General

Editorial Review:

At once praised and condemned by his contemporaries and by critics ever since for his highly complex poetic vision, William Butler Yeats remains one of the most important and controversial twentieth-century poets. In what has become a classic work of literary criticism, award-winning critic Harold Bloom breaks new ground with his radical interpretation of Yeats' relationship to the English Romantic tradition. Yeats tells the continuous story of the lifelong influence of Shelley, Blake, and the Romantic tradition upon Yeats' work. Through his analysis of the full spectrum of Yeats' poems and plays, Bloom offers a profound reinterpretation of poetic influence in general.

The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (Oxford Books of Verse)

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Scholarly, Academic, Historically Comprehensive; Where's the Humor? 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is a very scholarly textbook. It absolutely does what it sets out to do: provide an academic overview of the breadth of the history of Irish and English poetry from Ireland. That being said, where's the humor? Where's the humanity? Political and ecclesiastical history are well represented, and there's blood and tragedy a'plenty; but where are the people? I have to assume that I purchased something with extremely flawed expectations, but maybe that will help you decide whether to buy it.

Editorial Review:

Selected by Thomas Kinsella, a renowned poet and translator, this anthology presents the Irish tradition as unity: verse in Irish and English, usually regarded separately, are shown as elements in a shared and often painful history.
As the most wide-ranging anthology available--spanning from the pre-Christian era to the present day, the poems are grouped in three sections. Kinsella's first selections are from the earliest pre-Christian times and move forward to the first poetry in English from the 14th century. Next comes Irish bardic poetry and English poetry in the era of Swift and Goldsmith. The final section brings us to the recent past and the present with 19th- and 20th-century poets from Davis, Mangan, Yeats, and Ferguson to Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney.

District and Circle: Poems

Seamus Heaney

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Seamus Heaney's new collection starts "In an age of bare hands and cast iron" and ends as "The automatic lock / clunks shut" in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II – railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the "heavyweight / Silence" of "Cattle out in rain" – are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that "Anything can happen," and other images from the dangerous present – a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier – are fraught with this same anxiety.

But District and Circle, which includes a number of prose poems and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of love and excited language. In a sequence like "The Tollund Man in Springtime" and in several poems which "do the rounds of the district" – its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts – the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection. With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.

1000 Years Of Irish Poetry

KATHLEEN HOAGLAND

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

I keep it in the bathroom 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This is a breathtaking overview of Irish poetry. Great history in some of the older ones. I could have wished for more of that, but then there wouldn't have been as much room for the masters. I keep this one in the bathroom so I can take in some bits and chunks when I have a minute. It's a classic!

Editorial Review:

You can find almost anything in it. We very much doubt anyone is going to produce better anthology of Irish poetry than this one.--The New York Times

Selected Poems / Rogha Danta (The Bright Wave)

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill

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Editorial Review:

Now regarded as a landmark in contemporary Irish literature.

Great Poet Series, The : William Butler: Yeats (Great Irish poets)

Porter

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Editorial Review:

From the Great Poets series--exquisite small-format collections of classic poetry enhanced by full-color reproductions of period art, and readable, scholarly introductions. 12 full-color illustrations.

The Doctor's House: An Autobiography

James Liddy

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North: Poems

Seamus Heaney

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Mystic poems from the Celtic-Nordic Axis 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

These poems connect the twenty first century reader with the Celtic past of Ireland, in a unique way: through the experience of the marauding Vikings. Wonderful poems with a mythic edge. Heaney is fantastic.

Fans of Heaney's Beowulf translation will find a great introduction to his work here in this accessible group of poems.

Great Poems 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I don't know much about poetry, but as a fan of Irish culture, I decided to pick up this small collection. I was moved by the images. Heaney brought the past alive. I could picture the Vikings coming up the Shannon and storming Clen McNois and other monastries. Definately recommended!

Editorial Review:

With this collection, first published in 1975, Heaney located a myth which allowed him to articulate a vision of Ireland--its people, history, and landscape--and which gave his poems direction, cohesion, and cumulative power. In North, the Irish experience is refracted through images drawn from different parts of the Northern European experience, and the idea of the north allows the poet to contemplate the violence on his home ground in relation to memories of the Scandinavian and English invasions which have marked Irish history so indelibly.