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“This is the book to give anyone going to Ireland for the first—or the twentieth—time. Tillinghast tells us where traditional music is best heard, and how to look at Gandon’s Custom House and the Rock of Cashel. But he also recognizes that there is, as Yeats reminds us,‘an Ireland /The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.’Finding Ireland offers a sensitive introduction to that other Ireland in a series of meditations on Irish writers and the places they evoke for us, abiding presences even in today’s bustling republic of high-rises and industrial parks.” — Robert Tracy, University of California, Berkeley “Tillinghast offers an affectionate, questioning exploration of Ireland’s literary inheritance and a poet’s keen sense of the places which have inspired the country’s writers. He is alert, too, to the continuities and changes which characterize current experience.” — Terence Brown, Trinity College, Dublin Richard Tillinghast, a celebrated American poet and critic, lived for a year in Ireland in the early 1990s and returned each year until he became a resident in 2005. In Finding Ireland, Tillinghast writes from an insider/outsider perspective, vividly describing the land and people of his adopted home, its culture, literature, and long, complex history. Most of Finding Ireland is devoted to thoughtful readings of works by Irish writers and playwrights, including W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Oscar Wilde, and Brian Friel, as well as lesser-known names deserving a wider readership. Tillinghast also considers the significant contributions of Anglo-Irish authors, such as John Millington Synge and Elizabeth Bowen, with excursions into Irish architecture, music, and garden design. R I C H A R D T I L L I N G H A S T ’ S most recent poetry and essay collections are The New Life and Poetry and What Is Real, respectively. He lives in County Tipperary. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN 46556 undpress.nd.edu FINDING IREL A N D R I C H A R D T I L L I N G H A S T A P o e t ’ s E x p l o r a t i o n s o f I r i s h L i t e r a t u r e a n d C u l t u r e I R E L A N D A Poet , s Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture RICHARD TILLINGHAST ...

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