Images of Ireland [antikvár]

YEATS IN IRELAND Ireland's mountains and lakes, its hills and valleys, its small towns and smaller villages are everywhere in Yeats's poetry. Places had an almost sacramental importance for him. Ben Bulben, Kiltartan, Corcomroe, the Seven Woods al Coole, the Tower al Ballylee - he was always a great chanter of name upon name: My cousin is priest in Kilvamet, My brother in Mocharabuiee. And as ihe names come and go in Yeats's verse, they breathe a pressing sense of the poet's deep affinities with them; these places belong to him, he belongs to them. Yeats, in fact, lived much of his adult life in the city of Dublin. But the rural west of Ireland was crucial to him as a poet. His imagination ranged widely over Ireland - Tara and Cruachan, Cashel and Glendalough - but in the course of his creative life three places in Connaughl came to dominate the poet's mind: Sligo in his twenties and thirties, in his late thirties and forties Coole Park in Galway, and in his fifties and sbcties Thoor Ballylee in the same county. This book, therefore, begins by following Yeats through these western landscapes; it then takes a short excursion into other significant places in his rural Ireland, and, as he also led an intense and complex public and private life in Dublin, it ends with a series of images from thai ancient city's present and past. Yeats's imagination lived in non-Irish places, too, but these were rather landscapes of the mind: Renaissance palaces in Florence and Urbino, the ^Iden smithies of Byzantium, the spiritualists's strange mansions. Our book does not follow the poet into those mysterious places, yet the extracts offered here are representative of his work. The constant oppositions of youth and age, of life and death, of hate and love, of body and spirit. We catch here the inimitable excitement, passion and drama of his verse, we hear its music and we savour the clarity and subtle intelligence of his prose. Alain Le Garsmeur's photographs do not seek to re-create the Ireland that Yeats saw; instead they present what can still be seen now of what the poet looked at then. Yeats's work needs no visual enhancement, yet illustration has its own powerful and revealing virtues. The camera can put us in possession of Those images that yet Fresh images beget. It can look afresh at Yeats's Ireland, both making it new and yet turning us back again to the extraordinary poetry that he made out of it. SLIGO In childhood and youth Sligo was everything to Yeats. Elsewhere he was an exile. He knew this already as a schoolboy, when, walking in the London streets, he 'longed for a sod of earth from some field that I knew, something of Sligo to hold in my hand'. It is strange and beautiful country. If you walk out west from Sligo town past the harbour, you will soon come to Rosses Point, five miles from Sligo, 'a little sea-dividing sandy plain', and to 'Memory Harbour', once memorably painted by the poet's brother, Jack Yeats. Turning your back on the Atlantic and looking east you will see most of the hills and valleys that possessed Yeats's imagination from boyhood on. To the north lies the great mass of 'bare Ben