To Ireland, I

"A more far-fetched, eye-opening, and stimulating survey of Irish literature would be difficult to imagine. Informal and esoteric, scholarly and playful, the book is both an idiosyncratic encyclopedia and a secret history of unsuspected imaginative tendencies and possibilities....An instructive and thoroughly enjoyable work of imagination."--The Irish Herald"[To Ireland, I] is practically continuous with [Muldoon's] poems, and I wouldn't be surprised if in the long run it proves to be nearly as profound and inexhaustibly bountiful as they... Muldoon's stylishness, playfulness, and sheer erudition are impressive.... To Ireland, I stands as both testament and monument to that most fundamental of artistic rights, the right to freedom of association (association of ideas, that is). Muldoon's books, like Joyce's, are not to be devoured or comprehended all at once; rather, they are to remain always there, a part of the landscape to which we readers--if we are wise and fortunate reade

The four pieces that make up this work are taken from Muldoon's Oxford Clarendon Lectures of 1998. Together, they take the form of an A-Z, or abecedary of Irish literature, in which his imagination forges links between disparate aspects and individuals in the Irish literary landscape, ranging back and forth between modern and medieval. From Beckett and Bowen, through MacNeice, Swift and Yeats - and guided throughout by Joyce - To Ireland, I moves lightly through the long grass of Irish writing. The result is a provocative handbook for the literary traveller, who is treated to an astonishing display of scholarship and idiosyncratic inwardness from Irish literature over the course of a millennium.