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Irish writing begins in song, as does so much Irish life.
Joyce’s work is full of song. He had a beautiful tenor voice. Beckett loved the Schubert lieder. And the Irish theatre in the 20th century is full of song, from Yeats’s plays to the plays of O’Casey, and later the plays of writers such as Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Sebastian Barry and Billy Roche. You feel that much Irish writing for the theatre, or even for the page, is a rich substitute for singing. And beside song there is prayer, the formal language of incantation and supplication. Irish poetry over the past hundred years has maintained its roots in song and prayer; it has, unlike poetry elsewhere, kept faith with its audience, it has been written for readers to be cut out from the newspaper or copied out by hand, to be kept beside the bed, close to the prayer-book and the list of important telephone numbers. To be learned off by heart and recited in such a way that anyone listening, child or adult, could never forget the voice, the tone, the moment when the line ended and the rhyme hit home, and the strange, awed silence when the voice stopped reciting.
In Ireland, in the 20th century, the best and the brightest became teachers. A career in teaching was considered then like becoming a computer millionaire is now, a natural choice of profession for someone with brains. For my mother and her school friends, Sister Catherine offered a sort of lasting inspiration. In the late 1960s much of the school curriculum changed in the Republic of Ireland and a new set of poems and poets was added to the masterpieces of Shakespeare and Keats and Shelley and Yeats. It is remarkable how many of the poems chosen here [in The Irish Times Book of Favourite Irish Poems] are poems that were, or still are, part of the school curriculum. Thus, poets such as Patrick Kavanagh, Austin Clarke, F.R. Higgins and Thomas Kinsella entered the national imagination. ( from the in troduction by Toibín)
All of our books are second hand, and while you may not get the exact copy shown in the picture, all of our books are in very good condition. Removing stickers from a book may damage it, so we refrain from doing so. If you see a price sticker on a book, please ignore it.
