Customer Reviews

W. B. Yeats (Poets for Pleasure)

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Certainly some wag somewhere will say this Irish Little Book series is great, if only they had large print.

For truly 'tis a wee little book, not quite four by six inches. Your postcard home is larger, perhaps, but can never carry this great value, as well as you write.

Within this priceless Irish Little Books series we may find our greatest cultural and religious legacy, the enormous The Book of Kells (Irish Little Books). We find a book on The Famine (Irish Little Books), on Celtic Art, on Irish Blessings (Irish Little Books), on Irish Children's Names (Irish Little Books) (are they changed at the age of majority?), on Irish Sayings (Irish Little Books), Irish Toasts (Irish Little Books), Irish Verse, and here, the most wondrous of all, Mr. Yeats, illustrated and illuminated with Romanticist drawings and paintings.

Certainly there are several other books which are little, books which are Irish and little, even a Little Irish Bookshelf, but this series has been perfectly crafted. It is a jewel, and it is very favorably accessible. It will last a lifetime, even within your pocket, your purse, your boot. This is a pilgrim book, one for the road, and well represents the finest work of the great Mr. Yeats.

For we find here once more his best known verse. We read here gratefully again the famous Lake Isle of Inisfree. We watch in wonder and remorse the Wild Swans at Coole. We hear as the Irish Airman Foresees his Death. We remember When You Are Old. We recall together HB Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven: "Tread softly because you tread upon my dreams." We mourn "Down by the Salley Gardens." We sing the Song of Wandering Aengus, and the Song of the Old Mother. We watch that playful Squirrel at Kyle-na-no, altogether over thirty poems, well-loved, well packed here for the long pathway on ahead.

"When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream ( . . .)"

Exquisitely designed, as if a gift for a literate culture, it indeed makes a perfect gift for your best beloved, and for your own self. The illustrations are truly well selected for each poem, and tastefully placed. The font and its size are perfect for reading, with the titles in Celtic characters, and the poems in something like Times New Roman. It is hard if not impossible to find anything at all that is wrong in this book, except perhaps, of this Little Irish Book, I might wish, as my eyes grow further old and dim, for the Large Print Edition!

See also the great commentary in Professor Helen Vendler's Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, and the further and comprehensive collected works of Mr. William Butler Yeats, including in the ten (or more!) volume series The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (Collected Works of W B Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems) through The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume X: Later Articles and Reviews : Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts Written After 1900.

Apparently this review will get cast about to other products upon the amazon, including to a highly recommendable Little Irish Book series collecion of Yeats; nevertheless this review has to do with the Hodder Headline Audio Books of 1996 read by TP McKenna.

This reading is the exact same repackaged and sold in 2006 by Highbridge as W.B. Yeats: Poems (Highbridge Classics). Steven Rhea (star of The Crying Game (Collector's Edition)does not appear here. It is TP McKenna who reads, although here it is sold as about 80 minutes long whereas the Highbridge is timed out at 70 minutes in length.

The list of poems was not included in my copy, which otherwise appears complete. The songs upon the Highbridge, of wihch this is the same, are

This selection of 52 poems leaves little wanting to the scholar of Mr. Yeats, each read as I say as it ought to be read. We hear:

Down by the Salley Gardens

The MEditation of the Old Fisherman

Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea

The LAke Isle of Innisfree

The Pity of Love

When You Are Old

The White Birds

The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner

The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart

The Song of the Old Mother

The HEart of the Woman

HE remembers Forgotten Beauty

HE Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

The Fiddler of Dooney

In the Seven Woods

The Folly of Being Comforted

Adam's Curse

Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland

The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water

O Do NOt Love Too Long

Reconciliation

The Fascination of What's Difficult

The COming of Wisdom with Time

At Galway Races

All Things Can Tempt Me

Brown Penny

September 1913

Running to Paradise

The MAgi

The Wild Swans at Coole

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

A Song

Her Praise

Broken Dreams

Two Songs of a Fool

Easter 1916 ("a terrible beauty is born")

The Second COming ("slouching towards Bethlehem")

A Prayer for my Daughter

sailing to Byzantium

A Prayer for my Son

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz

For Anne Gregory

(from) vacillation

A Prayer for Old Age

What Then?

Beautiful Lofty Things

The Ghost of Roger Casement

The Spur

The Municipal Galley Revisited

Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?

Politics

Under Ben Bulben

All in all, if you have the technology, I would get the more recent Highbridge CD recording. The sound quality also seems superior. This would be okay for your pick-up truck while driving, until the sun melts the tapes or hiss sets in. McKenna is an excellent reader, has been a Shakespearean actor and his voice is well trained and emotive without being excessive, a proper restraint for Mr. Yeats. I find he adds his own pauses outside of the rhythmic meter which may for some mar the poetry, and you sit trying to figure out the rhyme scheme if you do not hear with book in hand (while driving?), but the poems thus truly become like living conversation.

I good choice if you must have cassette, but the audio cd may be now the preferred medium until we all go iPod.