Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran is one of the most striking and original literary undertakings of our time. Robinson’s ambition is to find out both what it is to know a landscape, know it as extensively and intimately as possible, and what it takes to make that knowledge, the sense of the landscape...
If you have been to Aran, or plan to go, or long to go, this book can serve as an aid to memory, an introduction, or a way there. But be warned: the reading demands care and a kind of faith—namely, that walking in circles is not for nothing.I carted this (very elegant—bless the NYRB) little volum...
I've heard Tim Robinson called Ireland's modern Thoreau, a claim I can't really endorse. (Way less nature writing, more cartography and anthropology. A bit of oral history for good measure. Excellent writing throughout.) Although I didn't love this book, I loved parts of it and it's quite good...
The lowest level of the cliff is prolonged below its southern sea-façade into a series of great steps the currach-men call An Altóir, the altar; to me, though, the cormorants that stand there wrapping their black wings about them like shawls seem to be playing the role of beggarwomen around the c...
Its professed intention was ‘to direct the attention of persons looking out either for investments or for new settlements, to the vast capabilities of the Sister Island’, and it goes into great detail on the manuring of land, the Incumbered Estates Act, and other practicalities; I suspect it was ...
In that report, viewers often hear about high and low temperatures, winds, and any rain or snow that may have fallen. You may hear people talk about temperatures, wind speeds, and rain, but do they really know what weather is all about? This isn't a book about weather, but in this chapter, you wi...
This fact, which I heard from the last man to leave this now deserted coastal hamlet in the south west of Connemara, would seem to lead one immediately and deeply into the lives of his vanished neighbours and their forebears. Nevertheless the generalities of historical geography are needed for it...
I had felt her head lift from my shoulder, and after a pause, to which thinking back on it later I could assign no length, her lips had rested on my forehead for a moment. Then she had unclothed my body’s warmer side of hers, let the sheet fall in her place, slipped my restraining murmur. All tha...