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ELT: VOLUME 35:4 1992 remains—for example, in a poem from The Wind Among the Reeds like "The Valley of the Black Pig"—is an apocalyptic vision that looks forward to a Celine or Sorel. Sometimes it is too easily overlooked as well that even in such a modernist locus classicus as "Sailing to Byzantium" Yeats already consciously employs a very postmodern sort of irony in which the poet's longing for transcendence into timeless stasis is deliberately subverted by the uncomfortable, certain knowledge that the prophetic duties of a mechanical bird, singing in an artificial paradise, "to keep a drowsy Emperor awake," are not so much superhuman as essentially trivial. Bruce Morris ___________________ Palo Alto, California Yeats and Images of Ireland Alain Le Garsmeur and Bernard McCabe. W. B. Yeats: Images of Ireland. New York: Macmillan Publishing; Toronto: Collier Macmillan Canada, 1991. 160 pp. $35.00 TO SAY THAT W. B. Yeats: Images of Ireland is the best coffee-table book on its subject might be taken as to damn with (at best) faint praise. However, it is true that few students of Yeats who have visited Ireland have come away without an enhanced understanding of his work. Yeats's fondness for invoking the actual landscape of his native country is well known. The tendency was most pronounced during his early career, when he was insistent on stressing the relationship between literature and nationality, continually offering such aphorisms as "There is no great literature without nationality, no great nationality without literature ." If his grasp of geographical/mythological detail was not always precise—in "Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland," for instance, a fairy goddess is apparently transformed into a mountain—his deployment of such landmarks as Knocknarea and Ben Bulben has made Sligo and its environs a holy place of literary pilgrimage. This volume offers 43 color and 49 black-and-white photographs by Alain Le Garsmeur, accompanied by selected passages, most often from The Celtic Twilight and Reveries Over Childhood and Youth. Many of the photographs are spectacular, with those of the waterfall at Glencar ("Towards Break of Day") and Lugnagall ("The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland") being perhaps the most impressive of all. One is occasionally taken aback by an anachronism: a picture of a ca. 1990 child on the beach isn't very useful in reading "To a Child Dancing in the Wind," and 536 BOOK REVIEWS the two color photographs of the Galway Races ("At Galway Races") seem a waste of the more expensive medium. But in main Le Garsmeur has done a superb job of evoking the Ireland of Yeats's time. The photographs begin with Sligo and progress to Coole Park, Thoor Ballylee, "Land of Heart's Desire" ("significant places in his rural Ireland"), and Dublin, though of course the book ends with the obligatory views of the grave and tombstone, the latter with its miscapitalized epitaph from "Under Ben Bulben." A twelve-page introduction by Bernard McCabe passes over the "Land of Heart's Desire" but offers a solid commentary on Yeats's interaction with the other venues. There is some de rigueur chastisement of Yeats for his attitude towards the Big House, McCabe arguing that "It is hard to accept now, this vision of underpaid servants and labourers being contentedly bird-like and tree-like"; and there are a few slips both here and in the two-page chronology. For instance, Yeats did not meet Lady Gregory "in literary Dublin in 1897" but rather in London, earlier (perhaps as early as 1894); and the Cuala Press would never have published a work with such a barbaric title as Essays 1931-6. But on balance Seamus Heaney's dust-jacket endorsement seems appropriate: "Bernard McCabe's introduction is an affectionate and skilful illumination of the space between the visionary Ireland of Yeats's poems and the Ireland visible in Alain Le Garsmeur's photographs." W. B. Yeats: Images of Ireland is thus a valuable addition to the collection of any Yeatsian, reminding those who have visited Ireland of the concreteness of Yeats's vision and enticing those who have not made the crossing to book passage. Richard J. Finneran University of...

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