Enter any bookstore, be it mom and pop or chain retailer, and there are sure to be stacks upon stacks of coffee table books with Irish photographs. But now comes one so lovely it seems more suited for an auction house than a coffee table. Gerald Hoberman has produced a book of breathtaking photographs thatRead more..
“I am of Ireland,” wrote William Butler Yeats in one of his most famous poems from 1933, and all we have to do is look at the stark images from the land where he lived and from which he absorbed his genius and his inspiration to know that this is true. Few poets have identifiedRead more..
Some thoughts on being Irish-American. ℘℘℘ As a proud Irish-American, I begin with a simple assumption: there is no way to precisely define that elusive, complex human category called the Irish-American. The tools of sociology are as inadequate to the task as the forms of the Census Bureau, and the jeweler’s art of the lexicographerRead more..
A native of Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. The following excerpts are taken from interviews conducted with him in 1986 and shortly after he won the Nobel in 1996. ℘℘℘ Poetry summons you. That’s been my own experience. The real difficulty about being a poet is not in theRead more..