Irish Books - Page 2

Yeats (A Galaxy Book 378)

Harold Bloom

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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.

Contemporary Irish Poetry, New and Revised editon

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

An Excellent Beginning 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Bradley's sure hand makes "Contemporay Irish Poetry" an engaging introduction to Irish poetry after Yeates, and his selections - such writers are Kavenaugh, Clarke, Kinsella and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney - show an eye for the major figures of today and thier influential predecessors, while not neglecting younger voices. Bradley's judicious selections from the individual writers lend a sense of their larger oeuvre, and the arrangement of the poets, the short bios which preface thier work and the convenient notes allow the reader to gain a sense of the larger issues of 20th century Ireland which the poets confront in their work. Very nicely done.

Editorial Review:

The poems featured in this anthology are quintessentially human documents informed by humor, compassion, and a joyful and visionary element--an impulse to praise what is really life and to protect it from the naysayers--as well as by a salutary realism and irony.
This revised edition features the work of Tom Paulin, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Durcan, Aidan Carl Mathews, Anne Hartigan, Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, and others who were not included in the first edition. Moreover, the selections from those poets featured in the first edition have, in many cases, been extensively changed and updated. In total, more than half the poems published in this second edition did not appear in the first.

W.B. Yeats: A New Biography

A. Norman Jeffares

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Editorial Review:

Forty years ago Norman Jeffares published his first biography of W.B.Yeats, however since that time much new material has come to light, both written and illustrative. This volume is a major reassessment of the poet's work, marking the 50th anniversary of his death. Professor Jeffares has drawn upon material in the Yeats collection now in the possession of the poet's son and daughter, Michael and Anne Yeats, in the Jeanne R.Foster - William M.Murphy Collection in Schenectady, New York and in the National Library of Ireland. He has had access to unpublished correspondence, and has based some of his comments on conversations with the friends and relatives of Yeats. The author has also written "A History of Anglo-Irish Literature".

Selected Poems (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

Patrick Kavanagh

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Editorial Review:

Published in order of first publication as far as possible, this selection ranges from initial offerings such as "Tinker's Wife" and "Inniskeen Road: July Evening" to his tragic masterpiece "The Great Hunger" (1942) and his celebratory later verse, "To Hell with Common Sense" and "Come Dance with Kitty Stobling", which show his increasing comic verve and detachment. The first comprehensive selection of Kavanagh's poetry to be published, this volume offers a timely reassessment of a poet unfairly neglected outside Ireland.

A Poet to His Beloved: The Early Love Poems of William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

As a young man, William Butler Yeats was deeply affected by the idea of romantic love, or, as he called it, "the old high way of love." Characteristically, much of his early poetry that which was written prior to 1910, is poetry that belongs to courtship.

When Yeats was twenty-three years old, he met and fell in love with the beautiful Irish nationalist, Maud Gonne. Although she repeatedly refused to marry Yeats, Maud would become the object of his passion and his poetry. The emotional power in many of Yeats' early poems is shaped by the one-sidedness of his affair with Maud, but the poems themselves remain hopeful and bitter-sweet, pure in their language and attitudes about love.

The forty-one poems collected in A Poet to his Beloved represent some of Yeats's most evocative and passionate early love poems. These versed are simple, lyrical, and often dreamy, and they speak knowingly of innocence and beauty, passion and desire, devotion and the fear of rejection.

Irish Verse (Dover Thrift Editions)

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Editorial Review:

Works by more than 60 Irish poets, from 18th century to modern times, include "Stella's Birthday" by Swift; Goldsmith's "Stanzas on Woman"; "The Harp that Once Through Tara's Halls" by Moore; Allingham's "The Fairies"; Yeats's "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time"; "Strings in the Earth and Air" by Joyce; plus verses by lesser-known poets.

Station Island

Seamus Heaney

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Heaney at his best 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This is still Heaney's best book of poetry to date. Centered around his 12 canto "Station Island," a poignant and disturbing 'portrait of the artist,' Station Island marked the transition in Heaney's career into the mature artist and greatest poet writing in English that we know today. A classic book of verse, written with lyrical precision and emotional power.

The master at his finest 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 7 people found this review helpful.

The title poem in this collection is one of the masterpieces of our day

Dante's Student 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

"Station Island" is a series of 12 poems in the second section of the book. It follows Dante's meeting with different shades in The Divine Comedy. Heaney himself claims to be deeply influenced by Dante, and it is a Dante through TS Eliot. Although unlike TS Eliot who increasingly become religious in his work (partly due to what Dante claimed in the Divine Comedy that writing needs a transcendence and it must come from god), Heaney rejects religion as a form of transcendence.

The book must be taken as a whole and as a whole, Heaney wishes, for the first time in his career, to shake off his past literary influences and Irish writers such as James Joyce (who wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Patrick Kavanagh, and William Caleton. It is also the first time that he wishes to explain his political apathy despite his success as a poet through remarkable poems like Chekhov on Sakhalin, section VIII of "Station Island". The poems are incisive and unapologetic, like the shade of James Joyce telling Heaney to "Let go, Let fly."

However, after rejecting religion, politics and his literary past in the sequence of poems, Heaney cannot provide an answer what and why he is writing for because:

"There a drinking deer
...
at a dried-up source."

The deer of poetry has met a drought of a pool of dried-up ink. If only he could provide a kind of transcendence then this book would have been perfect.

The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry

Various

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A good traditional anthology 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This is a good book to use in tandem with Muldoon's Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry and Crotty's Modern Irish Poetry for the understanding of contemporary Irish poetry. It allocates its main space to Kinsella, Heaney, Montague, Mahon, Muldoon and Durcan, in that order. Some of the poets may hold the substantial space allotted to them because they were important two and three decades ago, but this anthology nonetheless sparkles in the selections it makes from these poets, and in the inclusion of Deane, Grennan, Mathews and Sirr. The editor Mahon has made an outstanding selection from his own work, and the book is a good introduction to the important, mischievous work of Michael Hartnett. As an anthology it has a unified and valid character all its own in the presentation of contemporary Irish poetry.

'Jumping Off Shadows': Selected Contemporary Irish Poets (Poetry/literary criticism)

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Editorial Review:

A collection of poetry by graduates of University College, Cork writing in both English and Irish, Includes Paul Durcan, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Michael Davitt.

Ireland in Poetry

Charles Sullivan

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Full Emmersion 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Ireland in Poetry is full of lush paintings, photographs and drawings by Irish artists (both new and old). These include striking photos of Ireland today, oil paintings by Jack Yeats, historic photos now in the National Library and many other works of art.

Almost every page has an illustration and the space that is not occupied by illustrations are full of poetry, and oh what poetry it is! There are wonderful works from famous scribes, such as Yeats, Heaney, Burns, Kipling, and Joyce, as well as magical moments from less well known Chuilleanain, Donnelly, Hewitt.

The book is divided into four parts: 1) The country of Ireland, 2)The history of Ireland, 3) The people of Ireland, and 4) The future of Ireland.

Well worth finding - It will soak your senses!

Editorial Review:

136 illus., 67 in full color. 208 pp. 8 1/2 x 11. Orig. $39.95.