#000433
W. B. Yeats: Images of Ireland
W. B. Yeats; photographs by Alain Le Garsmeur; introduction by Bernard McCabe
This is a marriage of two Irelands—the one W. B. Yeats made in words and the one Alain Le Garsmeur found through a camera lens. *Images of Ireland* sets extracts from Yeats's poems, plays, essays, and memoirs against 44 color photographs and 53 duotones, moving through the landscapes that shaped him: Sligo, Coole Park, Thoor Ballylee, and Dublin. The photographer, an award-winning documentarian, has a gift for the weather and light of the west, and Bernard McCabe—who founded an Irish studies program at Tufts—supplies an introduction that frames the poet against his country. It is unabashedly a book to look at as much as read, but the selection of Yeats is intelligent, and the images earn their place beside him rather than merely decorating the verse. A fine gift for anyone who loves Yeats or the Irish landscape.
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The author
The words are Yeats's own, drawn from across his poems, plays, essays, and memoirs; the book is really a collaboration between the long-dead poet and two living hands. Alain Le Garsmeur is an internationally regarded photographer—he won recognition in 1986 for his images of China—whose landscape work here evokes the Ireland of Yeats's imagination. Bernard McCabe, of Irish parentage and the founder of an Irish studies programme at Tufts University, provides the introduction.
The book
Published by Macmillan in New York (and Little, Brown in Britain) in 1991, it is arranged as a journey through Yeats country: Sligo, Coole Park, Thoor Ballylee, the "Land of Heart's Desire," and Dublin. Forty-four color photographs and fifty-three duotones are paired with carefully chosen passages, so place and poem illuminate each other.
How it reads
It is a photographic tribute rather than a critical edition—browse it, don't study it. Its pleasure lies in the atmosphere: mist, stone, and water answering the cadence of the verse. The Yeats selections are strong enough that the book works as a gentle introduction as well as a keepsake.
For more context
Readers moved by it will want Yeats's Collected Poems and biographies that root him in Sligo and Galway.
Sources - Amazon listing - MW Books
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- W. B. Yeats; photographs by Alain Le Garsmeur; introduction by Bernard McCabe
- Publisher
- Macmillan
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1991
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Colorado
Places