To Ireland, I

In "To Ireland, I", Paul Muldoon produces a firework display of scholarship, wit, and intrigue, in an idiosyncratic wander through the alphabet of Irish lierature. From a mischievous beginning in Amergin - "the first poet of Ireland" - Muldoon forges link after link between the disparate and the unlikely, until modernists and medievalists appear as congenial neighbours on the half-lit, literary streets of Ireland. From Beckett and Bowen, through MacNeice, Swift, and Yeats - and ever-guided by Joyce - "To Ireland, I" tiptoes through the long grass of Irish writing, pirouetting at borders, diverting streams, into a landscape of pure Muldoon: of brilliant connections and irreverent asides, of improbable byways and unconventional leaps - but always a landscape of luminous engagement and genuine revelation. Muldoon's Ireland, shrouded in the feth fiada or "magical mist" of Gaelic literature, emerges as a strange estate, half-in, half-out of what he calls "the fairy realm". A provocative A to Z, with a particular emphasis on the continuity of the tradition, "To Ireland, I" is a jaunt through Irish literature from the poet Patrick Muldoon.