Literary Tour of Ireland [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Healy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1997

The author travels twenty routes on her all-Ireland circuit profiling many of the major figures of Irish literature and writing about those places in Ireland most closely associated with them.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Irish Amer Book Co; illustrated edition edition (September 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0863274463
• ISBN-13: 978-0863274466
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,106,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beguiling, glittering, pleasurable, April 1, 2008

By 

Martin H. Dickinson "Walker in the woods, dis... (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Literary Tour of Ireland (Paperback)

'A most beguiling, glittering book that offers riches of information and the pleasures both of recognition and discovery.' That is Elizabeth Healy's subtitle, and very aptly chosen it is.

Ireland is an endlessly rocking cradle of culture and the source of much that is great in literature written in the English and the Irish languages.

There is no better way to appreciate and understand this noble and great country than to take Healy's volume in hand and traverse her green hillsides and rocky promontories overlooking the wild North Atlantic. En route you'll see the homes and favorite haunts of the greats and the lesser known writers.

It is still something of a miracle that such a small place can have produced such literary wealth: Swift, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Burke, Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, and Beckett have made a major contribution to world literature over the past 300 years. Ireland's four Nobel prizes for literature have gone to Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and Seamus Heaney.

Ireland is especially blessed with a glorious language of its own: Irish. Healey does not stint in giving us many Irish passages, both from the storied past and present-day writiers, such as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, whose verses, according to Healy, capture something of the fierce tenderness of Kerry's rocky acres.

Healy is especially good in her maps and illustrations. She literally shows you the way there. I took this book with me to the Aran Isles, County Galway and Connemara. I walked the Bloomsday walk in Dublin, paused for coffee at Davey Byrne's, and also journeyed to Swift's tomb in Dublin.

SWIFT has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

Perhaps my favorite spot of all: Yeats' rebuilt Norman tower of Thoor Ballylee, set in a glen by a flowing stream and overlooking cow pastures near Gort, Galway. And just up the road, Coole Park, with its evocation of the patroness of Irish literature Lady Augusta Gregory:

Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand
When all those rooms and passages are gone,
When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound
And saplings root among the broken stone,
And dedicate--eyes bent upon the ground,
Back turned upon the brightness of the sun
And all the sensuality of the shade --
a moment's memory to that laurelled head.

William Butler Yeats "Coole Park, 1929"