To Ireland, I

The four pieces that make up this work are taken from Muldoon's Oxford Clarendon Lectures of 1998. Together, they take the form of an A-Z, or abecedary of Irish literature, in which his imagination forges links between disparate aspects and individuals in the Irish literary landscape, ranging back and forth between modern and medieval. From Beckett and Bowen, through MacNeice, Swift and Yeats – and guided throughout by Joyce – To Ireland, I moves lightly through the long grass of Irish writing. The result is a provocative handbook for the literary traveller, who is treated to an astonishing display of scholarship and idiosyncratic inwardness from Irish literature over the course of a millennium.