Book Reviews

Fiction

Early in her latest novel of ancient Ireland, Julienne Osborne-McKnight’s narrator says: “I listened to the words that everyone spoke around me, learned the languages of Greeks and Phoenicians, of Romans and Egyptians, badgered my father and mother for the languages of their homelands. I collected people through their stories and their behaviors and told myself the tales of their travels. In the stories, I belonged.”

Indeed, in Song of Ireland, Osborne-McKnight’s fourth novel, she once again returns to the theme of the power of stories. She also again calls upon her training as a folklorist to create a vivid, ancient world.

Song of Ireland revolves around The Sons of Mil and their quest for the land, which will become present-day Ireland. They sail from Egypt to Inisfail, the so-called “Isle of Destiny” of Gaelic legend. Led by the Bard Amergin (the book’s aforementioned narrator), they finally achieve this dream. They begin to live on this magical island, only

to find out they are not alone. They are joined by the legendary Danu, a mysterious group of little people who have spawned much talk because of their mysterious powers. But a battle for the island is not the point of this story. Amergin, instead, proposes that his people and the Danu inhabit the island together.

This is not to say tension and violence are completely avoidable. Osborne-McKnight draws up the action sequences, and throws in some magic and fantasy when necessary, to complement her excellent re-creation of everyday life in ancient times. All in all, Song of

Ireland stands nicely alongside Osborne-McKnight’s other tales of ancient Erin, which include I Am of Irelaunde, Daughter of Ireland and Bright Sword of Ireland. ($24.95 / 336 pages / Forge)

Poetry

Wake Forest University Press has taken quite a gamble. They have produced Volume 1 of what they call The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry and the names Heaney, Muldoon, Durcan or Yeats are nowhere to be found.

As Jefferson Holdridge writes in the Preface, this series “is a representative anthology meant to introduce to a broader audience a number of Irish poets, some young, some in their prime, who have not appeared widely before in North America.”

Holdridge ultimately chose a mere five poets to depict Ireland from “the burgeoning economic realities of The Celtic Tiger to the burden of religious and political realignment, from urban scenes to historical landscapes.”

Harry Clifton, Dennis O’Driscoll, David Wheatley, Sinead Morrisey and Caitriona O’Reilly are the chosen ones. This inevitably makes the collection seem a little narrow, like some interesting poet or two is missing. Then again, this is only Volume 1. Either way, these poems do offer an impressive mix of humor, romance, history and more. Indeed, the poets “sensitively record the effects of writing in a society that has shifted dramatically in the last decades,” as Holdridge argues.

The American-based poems of Dubliner Harry Clifton (“America, your poisons and elixirs / I drink by the glass / On Bourbon Street / and watch the winter pass” from “Absinthe at New Orleans”) stand out in particular for this reader. ($17.95 / 231 pages / Wake Forest University Press)

NON-Fiction

A native of Birr, Co. Offaly, Caimin O’Brien is an archaeologist with the Archaeological Survey of Ireland, a branch of the National Monuments Service of the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. This gives him unique insight into much of Ireland’s landscape, which he has put to interesting use in a new book called Stories from a Sacred Landscape. The book is an excellent example of local history, proving that sometimes it is best to look closely at a small slice of Irish life, rather than shallowly at the entire nation.

Stories from a Sacred Landscape explores the history of Christianity in Offaly, where some of the first Irish saints came from. O’Brien, who graduated from University College Galway with a degree in archaeology and later earned another degree in Medieval History at Trinity College Dublin, notes that Offaly was the place where the boundaries of four of Ireland’s five ancient provinces came together. This region became known as the “Flowering Garden of Monasteries.” But this is not mere religious history with pretty pictures. O’Brien argues that the monasteries in Offaly began to play important political roles in Irish life, eventually undermining their religious foundations.

O’Brien is uniquely qualified for a project such as this. His other books include Archaeological Inventory of County Offaly, The Medieval Churches of County Offaly and Archaeological Inventory of County Tipperary. Occasionally, he (as well his publisher) strain to argue that Offaly’s destiny was tied tightly to the Irish nation’s as a whole. All in all, however, Stories from a Sacred Landscape has a fascinating story to tell. (Go to Mercierpress.ie for more details.)

Another excellent example of local history is The Stars of Ballymenone by Henry Glassie, College Professor of Folklore at Indiana University and the author of previous books such as Passing the Time in Ballymenone, Turkish Traditional Art Today, The Potter’s Art and Vernacular Architecture.

This time around, Glassie investigates the farming community of Ballymenone, in County Fermanagh, and how the local people endured during the hardest days of The Troubles. This is journalism-meets-sociology and Glassie comes up with some fascinating stuff.

He put a decade of work into this project, focusing on the stories and songs of Ballymenone.

As Glassie provides important historical context, the voices of locals such as Hugh Nolan Michael Boyle, Peter Flanagan, Ellen Cutler and others leap off the page with local color. While Glassie’s skills as a recorder are excellent, The Stars of Ballymenone also includes a CD recording so you can actually listen to the tunes and words from the “stars” of Glassie’s book.

($35 / 480 pages / Indiana University Press)

Thomas Lynch’s latest book (just out in paperback) takes a close look at the complicated relationship between the Irish and Irish America.

In Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans Lynch writes of his initial visits to Ireland in 1970 to meet family in west Clare. Slowly but surely, Lynch learns as much from his Irish family (who at first seem hopelessly stuck in the past) as they learn from him.

Lynch combines family history with thoughts about the Catholic Church, alcoholism, and his own marital problems.

Booking Passage is Lynch’s follow-up to his National Book Award finalist The Undertaking as well as Bodies in Motion and at Rest. Lynch, who has written for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Esquire, Newsweek and The Irish Times, has also published three collections of poetry. That is evident in some of the lush, precise descriptions in Booking Passage.

($14.95 paperback / 296 pages / W.W. Norton)

Anybody Out There?

On the surface, Marian Keyes’ latest book chronicling the Walsh family of Dublin might seem a departure from the sort of frivolous “Sex in the City” fare which has made her an international best-seller.

All things seem perfect for Anna Walsh. She has a plum public relations job for

a cosmetics company in Manhattan. Naturally, she has a perfect husband, Aidan, as well. So when Anna wakes up in her family’s Dublin living room suffering from multiple injuries, and with no memory of what happened, it might seem like Keyes is setting Anna up for some sort of twisted collapse from perfection to misery. In fact, even when she returns to the Big Apple, it seems Anna’s seemingly perfect husband no longer wants to speak with her.

But relax, lovers of Marian Keyes. While her new book, Anybody Out There?, does indeed dabble in some dark material, it also contains much of the charm and hilarity that have become Keyes’ trademark.

Anybody Out There? is propelled by the vision which Keyes puts in the reader’s head of lovely Anna all smashed up, back home in Dublin with her quite eccentric mother trying to nurse her back to health

When Anna is finally able to get healthy again, she slowly begins to formulate a memory of how she ended up so badly injured: a car accident and the scent of lilacs play prominent roles as the story unfolds. In the end, this is another score for Keyes, who continues to balance life’s dark and light tones in her works. Extra credit should also go to Keyes for managing to depict both Dublin and New York City in such a comical, yet true-to-life fashion. ($24.95 / 464 pages / William Morrow)