#000427
Ireland in Poetry
Charles Sullivan (editor)
Charles Sullivan's *Ireland in Poetry* is one of those large, generous anthologies that treats a country as a subject worthy of both its poets and its painters. Published by Harry N. Abrams in 1990, it gathers roughly 150 poems—from the Celtic dawn through Yeats and Heaney to living voices—and sets them beside some 120 works of art: paintings, drawings, photographs, and manuscript pages. The pairing is the point. A verse about the western sea faces a canvas of the same light; a lament for the Troubles sits near an image that sharpens its grief. Sullivan, a poet himself who assembled companion volumes on America, has an editor's ear for how word and image amplify each other. It is a coffee-table book with real literary spine—handsome enough to browse, substantial enough to read straight through.
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The editor
Charles Sullivan is an American poet, educator, and anthologist who made a small specialty of the illustrated literary anthology—books that set poems beside paintings, photographs, and drawings so the two arts comment on each other. For the art-book house Harry N. Abrams he assembled companion volumes including America in Poetry and Imaginary Gardens, approaching editing as a curator would, choosing images with as much care as texts.
The book
Ireland in Poetry gathers roughly 150 poems spanning the whole arc of Irish writing—from early Celtic verse through the giants of the modern revival to contemporary voices—and pairs them with about 120 works of art. The design lets a poem and a picture share a spread, so a landscape in words meets one in paint, or an elegy for the Troubles meets an image that deepens it. Ireland's beauty and its long political grief both get their due.
How it reads
It works on two levels at once: a browsable art book for the coffee table and a genuine anthology you can read cover to cover. The selection is broad and intelligent rather than exhaustive—a fine first door into Irish poetry for the general reader.
For more context
Readers who enjoy it might follow individual poets—Yeats above all—into fuller collections, or seek out Sullivan's parallel volumes on other national subjects.
Sources - Amazon listing - Google Books
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Charles Sullivan (editor)
- Publisher
- Harry N. Abrams
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1990
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Colorado
Places