Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture and Environment ed. by Christine Cusick and Derek Gladwin (review)

Tim Robinson, an Englishman, has lived in remote and sparsely populated parts of the farthest western reaches of Ireland for decades (the Aran Islands, the Burren, and Connemara). An Irish speaker and enthusiastic birdwatcher, he can also be described—as the introduction to this volume helpfully enumerates—as a “cartographer, an ecologist, an environmentalist, a natural historian, a botanist, a mathematician, a geographer, an artist, a translator, and a landscape or topographical writer.” This collection of essays manages to capture many facets of Robinson’s diverse body of work. It both fills a gap and creates new openings in the burgeoning fields of ecocriticism, geocriticism, and space and place studies within Irish Studies.

A number of contributions here take as their subject the way in which Robinson’s work in particular, in its resistance to classification, both challenges and defines the interdisciplinarity of twenty-first-century Irish Studies. The collection takes as its guiding metaphor the appropriately kinetic and dimensional act of folding and unfolding, drawing from the name of Tim and Máiréad Robinson’s specialist publishing house, Folding Landscapes, an enterprise run from their home in Roundstone, Connemara. The contributions produce surprising and delightful, yet connected and useful shapes, revealing exciting ways of reading, understanding, and positioning the rich work of a gentle, generous, humble, self-effacing man.

Robinson’s work, as skilfully delineated in the collection, is like nothing else, though it recalls the Symbolist idea of the synesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, that disrespects divisions of art and experience and even somatic distinctions between the senses. In certain ways he is more like a mystic, only to be understood by what he is not. The radical receptivity and timelessness of his work does not result, however, in formless abstraction. Robinson is most emphatically not interested in transcendence but in the downward look, the earthbound step, the tiny, neglected detail, whether that is a detail of topography, history, or individual experience, especially of the forgotten, and the silenced. He is out of step with the speedy, hyper-individualistic, cursory world of the modern, but is not, as Eóin Flannery argues, seeking “a hypostatisation of so-called ‘tradition.’” To quote Flannery again, Robinson disqualifies “‘recoverability’ as a telos.” This connects him to other ecocritical thinkers, like Donna Haraway, similarly interested in debunking myths of origin and organic wholeness. His interest, as several essays discuss, in the partial, the inadequate, and in failure aligns him with Timothy Morton’s work of the last few years work on ecology without nature and queer ecologies. At the same time, Robinson’s openness and selfless receptivity recall Annie Dillard’s older tradition of nature writing, which advocates blurring the eyes and looking askance to truly see. With such a quicksilver, protean, elusive, and fascinating subject, the essays do a splendid job of holding Robinson’s work just still enough for us to gasp at the undiscovered delights to be found there, the rich vein to be tapped by scholars for decades to come.

Yet another striking feature of the collection is the contributors themselves, a gathering of impressive scholars, well-known and respected in their fields. But the greatest strength of the collection is the breadth of methodologies represented, some of them unexpected but nevertheless impressive and persuasive approaches to Robinson’s rich and category-defying work, such as Moynagh Sullivan’s feminist analysis; John Elder’s transatlantic reading; the essays by Catherine Marshall and Nessa Cronin, which retrieve Robinson’s early career as an artist and argue powerfully for its role in his more recent, better-known praxis; and Eóin Flannery’s postcolonial positioning. Gerry Smyth’s essay, which attends to the sounds, reverberations, and modes of listening in Robinson, is a tour de force. The sophisticated yet accessible quality of the contributions matches their...