Customer Reviews

The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing 3 Vol. Set

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A splendid collection of Irish writing from medieval Ireland to today. Poems,plays,political tracts from all the famous and not so famous authors. If you have a favorite, you will find him in these pages. It has given me untold hours of enjoyment. A super gift for those with a love of Irish literature.

Seamus Deane and Field Day have put together a most remarkable collection of writing, culled from Ireland's rich history of composition.

The pieces presented in the three volume initial set includes writings from all the most well-known of Ireland's writers. You have the bigs ones: Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Swift, Shaw, Kavanaugh, Wilde, Stoker, Heaney, and Synge, as well as hundreds of other contributors (including a few Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners). The writings are not just the best non-fiction or fiction, there are letters, plays, editorials, poems, songs, and folk tales, among others. Joyce's "Ulysses" as well as Yeat's "The Lake Isle of Inisfree" are in my opinion the two best pieces in this collection. "Inisfree" is heartbreaking in it's lyricism and rhythm, it's just hard to fathom that an individual can write like that.

The list of contributing editors is enough to carry a collection all by itself: Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, Declan Kiberd, and Terence Brown. It would have been interesting to see what the inimitable Paul Muldoon would have done if he had been asked to edit a section, but Mr. Muldoon still makes a presence with his writing.

With more than 4000 pages in the three volumes, the collection will fill many a night and day. There is no other resource that will allow one to own such a varied and beautiful biography of Ireland's writing history.