In this ambitious survey of the enduring Irish classics - works that stay fresh and challenge every generation - the author offers readers something original: a brilliant and accessible discussion of the greatest works since 1600 in the two languages that have shaped one of the world's most original literary cultures. Each chapter is devoted to the art of a single writer, and usually focuses on an outstanding, representative text.
Few critics of modern Irish literature have the linguistic competence to undertake such a task, but Kiberd is a respected Gaelic scholar, and in the course of his discussion of the great seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poems of dispossession, and of later work in that language which refuses to die, he provides vivid and idiomatic translations that bring the Irish texts alive for the English-speaking reader.
