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Rights: World
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Literary Tour of Ireland
Elizabeth Healy

“A most beguiling, glittering book that offers riches of information and the pleasures both of recognition and discovery.”

“An Irish Journey enriched and transformed by oral and literary traditions of its landscape.”

Yeats and Lady Gregory are our guides to the Sligo hills and their mythological presence. We meet Synge in Wicklow and O’Flaherty on the Aran Islands, O’Connor in Blarney Street, Cork, and John Hewitt at his home on the Antrim coast – a host of voices, including our greatest tale of all, the ancient Táin.

Belfast greets us in the poetry of Ciaran Carson, and the footsteps of Seamus Heaney bring us around Mossbawn. We view the villages where Goldsmith gambled and drank away his youth, and befriend the penniless poets of the ‘Hidden Ireland’ whose exquisite Irish verse is still echoes in modern song and story.

In Dublin are Wilde, Shaw and Swift, O’Casey, Joyce and Beckett – pouring words upon the cityscapes.

Finally, we enter Healy’s beloved Liffey, Plurabella, to complete a rewarding and exciting series of travels.